AMA | August 2025

Hello everyone, welcome to the August 2025 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Not a lot of news to report since the last AMA a month ago. The life in the summertime of a college professor trying to get papers written and books written does not really create a lot of adventures to relate, but that's okay.

Sometimes the adventures are in the mind. That's important also. There was a fun article that came out in Nature. They tried to figure out what physicists really think about the foundations of quantum mechanics. This is something that happens every so often that, you know, we try to take a poll of a bunch of physicists and ask them what they really think.

The problem is with that kind of approach that it's going to be very, very biased depending on who exactly you are polling. You're polling your friends, you're polling the people whose emails you happen to have, you're polling people at a certain kind of conference. Those sets of people might be very different in the kinds of quantum mechanics that they like. So I actually consulted a little bit with uh the authors of the piece to try to figure out how to get the largest cross-section of physicists.

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