Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas AMA | December 2025
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Dec 15, 2025 AI Snips
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Give Directly: High-Impact Holiday Giving
- Donate to GiveDirectly to send direct cash transfers that are proven effective for alleviating extreme poverty.
- Prefer donations to Pods Fight Poverty during the campaign for matched impact and targeted support to Rwandan families.
Why Electromagnetic Fields Become Classical
- Fermionic fields (like the Dirac/electron field) cannot form classical macroscopic fields because of the Pauli exclusion principle.
- Bosonic fields can pile up and form long-range classical fields, explaining why we routinely observe electromagnetic fields.
Entropy: Knowledge Versus Objective Counting
- Entropy can be defined subjectively (Gibbs/Shannon) or objectively (Boltzmann counting of microstates), and both are useful depending on context.
- Knowledge of a subsystem does not change its objective thermodynamic behavior, and entanglement makes subsystem entropy irreducible for black holes.