Sean Carroll Quotes & Sayings

The result is a complete fiasco. Our simple estimate of what the vacuum energy should be comes out to about 10105 joules per cubic centimeter. That's a lot of vacuum energy. What we actually observe is about 10-15 joules per cubic centimeter. So our estimate is larger than the experimental value by a factor of 10120 - a 1 followed by 120 zeroes. Not something we can attribute to experimental error. This has been called the biggest disagreement between theoretical expectation and experimental reality in all of science. — Sean Carroll

A hundred quintillion googols! — Sean Carroll

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions. — Sean Carroll

STUDYING TIME MACHINES IN FLATLAND — Sean Carroll

The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it. — Sean Carroll

If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it. — Sean Carroll

There's nothing wrong with doing elaborate double-blind studies to look for parapsychological or astrological effects, but the fact that such effects are incompatible with the known laws of physics means that you would be testing hypotheses that are so extremely unlikely as to render it hardly worth the effort. — Sean Carroll

It's possible that we are being watched and judged by a race of super-intelligent aliens, who will think badly of us and destroy the Earth if we allow ourselves to be cowed by frivolous lawsuits and don't turn on the LHC. When possibilities become as remote as what we're speaking about here, it's time to take the risks and get on with our lives. — Sean Carroll

An elegant mechanism emerges: a broken symmetry, hidden from our view by a field pervading space. — Sean Carroll

Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect was the work for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1905, and Einstein has another paper in the very same journal where it appeared - his other paper was the one that formulated the special theory of relativity. That's what it was like to be Einstein in 1905; you publish a groundbreaking paper that helps lay the foundation of quantum mechanics, and for which you later win the Nobel Prize, but it's only the second most important paper that you publish in that issue of the journal. — Sean Carroll

The idea of "Ten Commandments" is a deeply compelling one. It combines two impulses that are ingrained in our nature as human beings: making lists of ten things, and telling other people how to behave. — Sean Carroll

At heart, science is the quest for awesome - the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It's a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives. — Sean Carroll

The strength of the electromagnetic interaction, for example, is fixed by a number called the "fine-structure constant," a famous quantity in physics that is numerically close to 1/137. — Sean Carroll

Is time real? ... In one sense, it's a silly question. The "reality" of something is only an interesting issue if its a well-defined concept whose actual existence is in question, like Bigfoot or supersymmetry. For concepts like "time," which are unambiguously part of a useful vocabulary we have for describing the world, talking about "reality" is just a bit of harmless gassing. They may be emergent or fundamental, but they're definitely there. — Sean Carroll

Way back in 1831, Michael Faraday, one of the founders of our modern understanding of electromagnetism, was asked by an inquiring politician about the usefulness of this newfangled "electricity" stuff. His apocryphal reply: "I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it". — Sean Carroll

When society puts some small fraction of its wealth into asking and answering big questions, it reminds us all of the curiosity we have about our universe. And that leads to all sorts of good places. — Sean Carroll

If a symmetry between electrons and electron neutrinos is like comparing apples to oranges, trying to connect fermions with bosons is like comparing bananas to orangutans. — Sean Carroll

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today. — Sean Carroll

The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it's up to us to make sense of it and give it value. — Sean Carroll

One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing the workings of the world is no longer thought to be in conflict with faith in God. I would like to argue against this trend, in favor of a more old-fashioned point of view that is still more characteristic of most scientists, who tend to disbelieve in any religious component to the workings of the universe. — Sean Carroll

Lederman is also a charismatic personality, famous among his colleagues for his humor and storytelling ability. One of his favorite anecdotes relates the time when, as a graduate student, he arranged to bump into Albert Einstein while walking the grounds at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The great man listened patiently as the eager youngster explained the particle-physics research he was doing at Columbia, and then said with a smile, That is not interesting. — Sean Carroll

Part of the sting was taken away when the American Physical Society awarded its 2010 Sakurai Prize in theoretical physics to Hagen, Englert, Guralnik, Higgs, Brout, and Kibble - in that order, which seems to have been chosen specifically to make it impossible for anyone to complain. (Anderson might have reasonably complained.) — Sean Carroll

(The neutron is a bit of a drama queen.) — Sean Carroll

Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans - and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas - than quantum mechanics. — Sean Carroll

The homunculus narrator experiences everything backward - his first memory is Unverdorben's death. He has no control over Unverdorben's actions, nor access to his memories, but passively travels through life in reverse order. At first Unverdorben appears to us as a doctor, which strikes the narrator as quite a morbid occupation - patients shuffle into the emergency room, where staff suck medicines out of their bodies and rip off their bandages, sending them out into the night bleeding and screaming. But near the end of the book, we learn that Unverdorben was an assistant at Auschwitz, where he created life where none had been before - turning chemicals and electricity and corpses into living persons. Only now, thinks the narrator, does the world finally make sense. — Sean Carroll

Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously better. — Sean Carroll

One is our tendency to give higher credences to propositions that we want to be true. This can show up at a very personal level, as what's known as self-serving bias: — Sean Carroll

It's only because the data force us into corners that we are inspired to create the highly counterintuitive structures that form the basis for modern physics. — Sean Carroll

Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That's us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride. — Sean Carroll

Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed. — Sean Carroll

The ancient Greeks, according to Pirsig, saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes. — Sean Carroll

Christopher Savage have calculated that in reasonable models, we expect about ten dark-matter particles to interact with the atoms in a typical human body every year. The effects of every individual interaction are pretty negligible, so don't worry about getting a dark matter stomachache. — Sean Carroll

The interaction of gravity with other forces seems to be able to create order while still making the entropy go up - temporarily, anyway. That is a deep clue to something important about how the universe works; sadly, we aren't yet sure what that clue is telling us. — Sean Carroll

Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. - Stephen Toulmin — Sean Carroll

The behavior of temperature and heat and so forth can certainly be understood in terms of atoms: That's the subject known as "statistical mechanics." But it can equally well be understood without knowing anything whatsoever about atoms: That's the phenomenological approach we've been discussing, known as "thermodynamics." It is a common occurrence in physics that in complex, macroscopic systems, regular patterns emerge dynamically from underlying microscopic rules. Despite the way it is sometimes portrayed, there is no competition between fundamental physics and the study of emergent phenomena; both are fascinating and crucially important to our understanding of nature. — Sean Carroll

Our goal over the next few chapters is to address the origin of complex structures - including, but not limited to, living creatures - in the context of the big picture. The universe is a set of quantum fields obeying equations that don't even distinguish between past and future, much less embody any long-term goals. How in the world did something as organized as a human being ever come to be? — Sean Carroll

It doesn't include math or logic, nor does it address issues of judgment, such as aesthetics or morality. Science has a simple goal: to figure out what the world actually is. Not all the possible ways it could be, nor the particular way it should be. Just what it is. There's — Sean Carroll

One of the older professors in the department didn't find my talk very convincing and made sure that everyone in the room knew of his unhappiness. The next day he sent an e-mail around to the department faculty, which he was considerate enough to copy to me: Finally, the magnitude of the entropy of the universe as a function of time is a very interesting problem for cosmology, but to suggest that a law of physics depends on it is sheer nonsense. Carroll's statement that the second law owes its existence to cosmology is one of the dummest [sic] remarks I heard in any of our physics colloquia, apart from [redacted]'s earlier remarks about consciousness in quantum mechanics. I am astounded that physicists in the audience always listen politely to such nonsense. Afterwards, I had dinner with some graduate students who readily understood my objections, but Carroll remained adamant. I hope he reads this book. — Sean Carroll

This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern. — Sean Carroll

We are part of the universe that has developed a remarkable ability: We can hold an image of the world in our minds. We are matter contemplating itself. — Sean Carroll

(A substantial fraction of the atoms in the body of a typical physicist were once in the form of pizza.) — Sean Carroll

Each day, the moon's gravitational field tugs at the earth as it rotates underneath. At CERN, this tiny stress caused the total length of the LEP tunnel to stretch and contract by about a millimeter (one-twenty-fifth of an inch) every day. Not such a big deal in a seventeen-mile-long beam pipe, but enough to cause a tiny fluctuation in the energy of the electrons and positrons - one that was easily detectable by the high-precision instruments. After some initial puzzlement at the daily energy variations, the CERN physicists quickly figured out what was going on. — Sean Carroll

The most famous story about gravity involves Isaac Newton and an apple that supposedly fell on his head, inspiring him to concoct his theory of universal gravitation. (It's mostly famous because Newton himself couldn't stop telling it later in life, in an unnecessary attempt to add some extra juice to his reputation as a genius.) — Sean Carroll

The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn't "go" anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it's not "stuff"; it's a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends. — Sean Carroll

As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable. — Sean Carroll

Walter Wagner, the man who had gone to court to stop the Large Hadron Collider from beginning operations. A serious charge had been leveled: the LHC was a hazard to the very existence of life on earth. JO: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances the world is going to be destroyed? Is it one in a million, one in a billion? WW: Well, the best we can say right now is about a one-in-two chance. JO: Hold on a second. It's ... fifty-fifty? WW: Yeah, fifty-fifty ... If you have something that can happen, and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen, or it's going to not happen, and, so, the best guess is one in two. JO: I'm not sure that's how probability works, Walter. — Sean Carroll