Ask Me Anything | October 2026

Sean Carroll (0:00)

Hello, everyone, welcome to the October 2026 Ask Me Anything edition of the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. No long introduction today, I want to get into it, but just a couple of quick announcements. One announcement is that I'm still trying to get over a cold that I caught like a week and a half ago, but it's still like making me cough and affecting my voice. So if I sound a little husky, that's why. That might also happen in a couple of the regular episodes that I recorded of late recently. I'm not gonna tell you which ones, but just because you're at death's door, that's no reason you can't podcast. You gotta podcast through it. That's the only way to get things done. So we're gonna do it anyway. And the other announcement is there is a little post on the Patreon. If you wanna go visit that, that's patreon.com/seanm.

Carroll. Not that you have to join Patreon, but I just put on Patreon a couple of links to new useful web pages. So search for a public post, a post that has opened anyone to read, called New Useful Web Pages, and we'll link you two different places. One is Andy Jiang. These are both listeners to the podcast, have just been kind enough to set these up. I don't have time to do this kind of thing. So Andy set up a search site specifically for the AMAs. There's a search capability on the regular podcast web page, which is preposterousuniverse.com/podcast, where you can search all of the episodes. But if you specifically wanna go to the AMAs, you can go to Andy's website, and best to go to Patreon and look for the link. But if you wanna know what the URL is, it's HTTP colon slash slash Mindscape, S-E-A-R dot C-H. Get it? So like dot C-H is if you're in Switzerland, but it's really spelling out Mindscape search with a period before the C-H. The other one is from Max Grote, and he has used AI and his coding skills to make Mindscape Explorer, which is basically a way to sort of do content analysis of all of the episodes. So in other words, you can ask, well, okay, this episode talked about something, but what other episodes talked about related things? What is the episode that is most like this one? What is the episode that is least like this one? What are the favorite topics overall or the least favorite topics? Things like that.

It's a little eerie, honestly, like seeing all these things that you've talked about. Some of the things that are very frequent topics are not ones I would have guessed if you had asked me the number of years ago when I started Mindscape, but you know, that's it. Life is unpredictable and chaotic and you roll with it. So many thanks to Andy and to Max for doing that. And I do suggest that you go check it out. We've covered a lot of ground over the years. That is for sure. And you too could be a Patreon supporter of Mindscape if you wanted to be. Just go to patreon.com plus Sean M. Carroll and sign up. And put in a buck per episode or whatever it is, or five bucks per month, and you get all sorts of wonderful benefits. You get ad-free versions of the podcast. You get the ability to ask AMA questions. You get the little reflection episodes, five minutes of me talking about what happened in the episode you just listened to and so forth. And it's a good thing to be able to do it. I support plenty of other people on Patreon for the things that I get from them. It's a nice way to keep the economy humming. So, but you're still welcome to listen to Mindscape, whether or not you're a Patreon supporter. And with that very communal, generous thought, let's go.

Our first question is from Josh, who says, Open AI recently announced that an internal AI system produced a proof that the 3D Navier-Stokes equations can blow up in finite time. Though the construction needs an external force, and some mathematicians say it isn't the version they really care about. As a physicist, how do you think about this? Navier-Stokes is a continual approximation that presumably breaks down well before any true singularity. So what does a mathematical blow up tell us about actual fluids, if anything? And more broadly, if AI systems start settling deep questions in math and physics with proof no human can fully follow, what changes about what it means to understand something as opposed to merely knowing that it's true?

Yes, so this is the big news in certain circles. I think it's deservedly big news. Both this particular result from OpenAI that they claim a solution to the question of whether or not the fluid mechanical descriptions of called the Navier-Stokes equations lead to a singularity in finite time under certain conditions. And this is a very famous problem, a millennium problem. You win a million dollars if you get it. OpenAI spent much more than a million dollars trying to do it, so they were not in it for the money.