Top all-time · #180
Sean Carroll
Personal blog · preposterousuniverse.com/blog · on HN as consumer451sciencephilosophy
Sean Carroll's personal blog at preposterousuniverse.com covers science and philosophy. Since 2009, 248 different Hacker News readers have linked it 437 times, most often “Sean Carroll's Podcast, Mindscape”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 20 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sean Carroll's blog and its Mindscape podcast, mostly for the podcast's interviews and his physics explanations, including on energy conservation and gravity.
- Recommended for · 20 comments
- Podcast called informative, entertaining and thought-provoking; posts called excellent, good and highly recommended.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Sean Carroll's Podcast, Mindscape15 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2019-02-27
- Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)11 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2015-05-01
- Energy Is Not Conserved8 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2019-06-06
- The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2013-02-08
- The Notorious Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser – Sean Carroll6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-02-20
- The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-01-16
- Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics Is Probably Correct5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-06-30
- /podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-08-08
- The Universe Is Not a Black Hole4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-09-18
- /podcast/2022/05/23/198-nick-lane-on-powering-biology/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-06-05
What Hacker News says?
Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it. [0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ [1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...
Comment linking /podcast/2018/11/26/episode-24-kip-thorne-on-gravitational-waves-time-travel-and-interstellar/
on “Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]”Submitted Space Emerging from Quantum Mechanics as a story · 131 points
HN discussionIn the same vein as those: Conversations with Tyler and Sean Carroll's Mindscape. https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
Comment linking /podcast/
on “Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video]”Submitted Is work necessary? as a story · 106 points
HN discussionThis podcast interview with Brooke Harrington gave me some good insights into how people manage offshore wealth: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/22/237-...
Comment linking /podcast/2023/05/22/237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system/
on “Tips for linking shell companies to their secret owners”Submitted Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy as a story · 95 points
HN discussionHere's an excellent explanation on cosmic inflation from Sean Carroll: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/03/16/gravitat...
Comment linking /blog/2014/03/16/gravitational-waves-in-the-cosmic-microwave-background/
on “Gravity waves from Big Bang detected”Submitted Einstein and Pi as a story · 61 points
HN discussionIt is well possible that GPT-4.1 references Sean Carroll, either directly or by regurgitation. > One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the beginning of both time and space; that to ask about spacetime “before the Big Bang” is like asking about land “north of the North Pole.” Source: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/writings/dtung/ I'm a regular listener of his Mindscape podcast, and that's where I…
Comment linking /podcast/
on “Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole”Submitted Energy Is Not Conserved (2010) as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI recently heard this comment by Sean Carroll in his June AMA episode https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/13/ama-... --- [..] we do not have a fixed pot of money that we sit down and say, “What is the best way we can spend this on research?” It’s not like there’s a fixed number of dollars and we say, “Okay, biology gets so many and chemistry gets so many, and particle physics gets so many.” This is…
Comment linking /podcast/2022/06/13/ama-june-2022/
on “Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic particles”Submitted The Laws Underlying the Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood as a story · 47 points
HN discussionSean Carroll's: Mindscape is a pretty thought-provoking podcast by a bona fide "cosmological philosopher". The topics/guests cover a wide spectrum of specialties in the physical sciences, humanities, technology, psychology and more. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
Comment linking /podcast/
on “Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious”Submitted Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality [audio] as a story · 24 points
HN discussionDark energy may be the energy of vacuum itself, that's why it's constant. And no, energy conservation does not apply in this case. There is a good blog article on precisely this question by Sean Carroll: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-...
Comment linking /blog/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/
on “Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate”Submitted Dark Matter vs. Modified Gravity: A Trialogue (2012) as a story · 18 points
HN discussionAzra Raza was also on the Mindscape podcast, really realy good interview. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/12/16/77-a...
Comment linking /podcast/2019/12/16/77-azra-raza-on-the-way-we-should-fight-cancer/
on “Experimental blood test detects cancer up to four years before symptoms appear”Submitted Cuts to Science Funding and Why They Matter – Sean Carroll as a story · 11 points
HN discussionCosmologically we turn to the conservation of energy-mass-momentum wherein the matter fields at one point in spacetime can donate energy-mass-momentum into the gravitational field, and can pick some of that up again at a distance from the gravitational field, typically changing local matter field content's (linear) momentum. At cosmological scales the "objects" are the various matter fields (in the most general sens…
Comment linking /blog/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/
on “Second Gravitational Wave Detected at LIGO”Submitted There Is No Classical World as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThe "why is there something rather than nothing" is a fascinating and mind boggling philosophical question. A good read is https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2018/02/08/why-is-...
Comment linking /blog/2018/02/08/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing-2/
on “Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’”Submitted How the Economy Mistreats Stem Workers as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIn your card example, the theory that posits that you picked the cards intentionally is something that can be subjected to scientific scrutiny. We are allowed to ask where you came from, what caused you to form the intent, and then prove or disprove such claims. No such inquiry is allowed with fine tuning, because it's designed to terminate the scientific probing. The designer is beyond understanding by definition.…
Comment linking /blog/2014/06/30/why-the-many-worlds-formulation-of-quantum-mechanics-is-probably-correct/
on “Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’”Submitted On Determinism (2011) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIf something is universally true then it shouldn’t have to do with whether you or I can travel at the speed of light. But beside that, you’re incorrect. Energy is not conserved in this universe. See e.g. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-... for an explanation.
Comment linking /blog/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/
on “Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers”Submitted Sean Carroll's Podcast, Mindscape as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThere’s a good episode of the Mindscape podcast (hosted by Sean Carroll) interviewing one of the authors (Blaise Agüera y Arcas) about the paper: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/08/19/286-...
Comment linking /podcast/2024/08/19/286-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-on-the-emergence-of-replication-and-computation/
on “Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions”Submitted Response to “On the time lags of the LIGO signals” with notebooks as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis seems quite reasonable, but I recently heard a podcast ( https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/24/280-... ) that LLMs are more likely to be very good at navigating what they have been trained on, but very poor at abstract reasoning and discovering new areas outside of their training. As a single human, you don't notice, as the training material is greater than everything we could ever learn. Afte…
Comment linking /podcast/2024/06/24/280-francois-chollet-on-deep-learning-and-the-meaning-of-intelligence/
on “Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought”Submitted Riemannian Geometry and Non-Euclidean Geometry as a story · 5 points
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