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Sean Carroll Quotes

Sean Michael Carroll is a cosmologist and physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity. He is a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist.

He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth , and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time, and the Higgs boson. He is also the author of three popular books: one on the arrow of time entitled From Eternity to Here, one on the Higgs boson entitled The Particle at the End of the Universe, and one on science and philosophy entitled The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals on a variety of science-related topics.

✵ 5. October 1966
Sean Carroll photo

Works

From Eternity to Here
Sean Carroll: 10 quotes0 likes

Famous Sean Carroll Quotes

“Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal.”

Sean Carroll

[The Eternally Existing, Self-reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe, Preposterous Universe blog, 21 October 2011, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/10/21/the-eternally-existing-self-reproducing-frequently-puzzling-inflationary-universe/]

“The mystery of the arrow of time comes down to this: Why were the conditions in the early universe set up in a particular way, in a configuration of low entropy that enabled all of the interesting and irreversible processes to come?”

Sean Carroll book From Eternity to Here

[From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, 2010, https://books.google.com/books?id=pi4kDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA3] (p. 3)

“All of my advice comes from remembering what I did wrong and then telling people not to do it. … Don't wait to read the most recent research papers. … Wonder how you could do better. … Do your own research projects. Take the initiative. … Ask your own questions — try to answer them. … At some point you stop being a student and you start being a scientist. … And it's a completely different skill set …”

Sean Carroll

[Episode #124 - In Search of Reality: A Conversation with Sean Carroll, 21 April 2018, Waking Up Podcast with Sam Harris, https://samharris.org/podcasts/124-search-reality/] (1:21:12 of 1:58:24)

“In contrast to the arbitrarily complicated evolution of a (nonintegrable) classical system, all a quantum state ever does is move in circles.”

Sean Carroll

FQXi Prize winning essay What if Time Really Exists? http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/318, 2008.

“There probably are more forces than we know about, but they’re only going to be of direct interest to physicists, I’m afraid. No tractor beams.”

Sean Carroll

[Column: Looking for New Forces, Preposterous Universe blog, 4 November 2011, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/11/04/column-looking-for-new-forces/]

“The “reasons” and “causes” why things happen, in other words, aren’t fundamental; they are emergent. We need to dig in to the actual history of the universe to see why these concepts have emerged.”

Sean Carroll

Chap. 5 : Reasons Why
The Big Picture (2016)

Sean Carroll Quotes

“Metaphysical principles are tempting shortcuts but not reliable guides. There are good reasons why things often seem to happen for reasons—and also reasons why that’s not a bedrock principle.”

Sean Carroll

Chap. 5 : Reasons Why
The Big Picture (2016)

“What we’re seeing is a manifestation of the layered nature of our descriptions of reality. At the deepest level we currently know about, the basic notions are things like “spacetime,” “quantum fields,” “equations of motion,” and “interactions.””

Sean Carroll

No causes, whether material, formal, efficient, or final. But there are levels on top of that, where the vocabulary changes.

Chap. 3 : The World Moves by Itself
The Big Picture (2016)

“Meaning in life can’t be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won’t be around to savor it.”

Sean Carroll

Chap. 1 : The Fundamental Nature of Reality
The Big Picture (2016)

“When exactly does an observation occur? ... What were the laws of physics doing before there was anyone measuring things? And what do you mean by a measurement, anyway? Does it have to be a consciousness human being? ... Can a rock or a virus or an earthworm do an observation?”

Sean Carroll

[The Many Worlds Theory, 24 October 2018, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXRLDatmbgA] (12:16 of 56:11)

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