A bit of a change of pace for the CA podcast today: We're going to be doing SCIENCE instead of politics. We're joined by one of the world's leading popular science writers, physics professor Sean Carroll, whose bestselling books include The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself and Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. His latest book is The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Quanta and Fields.

Sean is here today to discuss how our understanding of the world around us has developed over time, how much stranger the world is than our "common sense" perceptions of it would indicate, and how laypeople with no background in the physical sciences can begin to grasp and appreciate the deepest hidden truths about the Universe. Sean is an eloquent spokesperson for the view that a godless universe can still be a poetic and beautiful one, and there may be more connections between the political and the physical than it first appears...