245 | Solo: The Crisis in Physics

Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what numbers actually mean. One window on the ways that species differ is how they play amo ...  Show more

Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether ...  Show more

Last time, we introduced the biggest open problem in theoretical physics - the problem of combining gravity with quantum mechanics. In this first part of a three-part series, we introduce the leading candidate for how to do that: String Theory.

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Can a whole universe fit inside a black hole? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Paul Mecurio explore grand unification, dark matter, wave function collapse, and other problems in physics with theoretical physicist and author of “Existential Physics,” Sabine Hossenfelder. 

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In this special celebratory 100th episode, I discuss six major unsolved problems in science: the P vs NP problem in computer science, the mystery of dark matter in physics, the existence of the island of stability in chemistry, the historical occurrence of a snowball Earth scenar ...  Show more

Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time. Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debate since ...  Show more