Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll
Sean Michael Carrollis 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 and magazines such as Nature, Seed, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 October 1966
CountryUnited States of America
thinking yesterday benjamin-button
The fact that you can remember yesterday but not tomorrow is because of entropy. The fact that you're always born young and then you grow older, and not the other way around like Benjamin Button - it's all because of entropy. So I think that entropy is underappreciated as something that has a crucial role in how we go through life.
law understanding want
We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.
firsts facts moments
Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.
matter speed hours
The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.
magic world
The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.
equations
God is not described in equations.
atheist self ideas
Just the idea that we, these little collections of atoms and molecules, are part of the world, but a part that can look at the rest of the world and figure it out in a self-referential way, is kind of breathtaking.
data understanding add
Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It's not well-defined, it's completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding.
simple reality understanding
We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description.
time past glasses
The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.
aspects huge lots time trying
I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.
account bit cool everyday full given happened happens lives needs understanding
A full understanding of what happens in our everyday lives needs to take into account what happened at the Big Bang. And not only is that intrinsically interesting and just kind of cool to think about, but it's also a mystery that is not given much attention by working scientists; it's a little bit underappreciated.
larger science
I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.
call conditions embedded larger local similar
If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a multiverse, then there's other places in this larger structure that have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could be pretty similar to what we have here.