Top 15 Sean M. Carroll Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Sean M. Carroll Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
Sean M. Carroll
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.
Sean M. Carroll
I’ve loved physics from a young age, but I’ve also been interested in all sorts of big questions, from philosophy to evolution and neuroscience. And what those fields have in common is that they all aim to capture certain aspects of the same underlying universe.
Sean M. Carroll
The idea that time is an illusion is an old one, predating any Times Square ball drop or champagne celebrations. It reaches back to the days of Heraclitus and Parmenides, pre-Socratic thinkers who are staples of introductory philosophy courses.
Sean M. Carroll
Whenever you say you’re a physicist, there’s a certain fraction of people who immediately go, ‘Oh, I hated physics in high school.’ That’s because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams.
Sean M. Carroll
Even in empty space, time and space still exist.
Sean M. Carroll
Someday, when the ultimate laws of physics are in our grasp, we may discover that the notion of time isn’t actually essential. Time might instead emerge to play an important role in the macroscopic world of our experience, even if it is nowhere to be found in the final Theory of Everything.
Sean M. Carroll
Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there’s the physical world and God. Naturalism says there’s only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else.
Sean M. Carroll
The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it’s not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It’s not there. So it’s a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.
Sean M. Carroll
I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
Sean M. Carroll
Science isn’t just about solving this or that puzzle. It’s about understanding how the world works: the whole world from the vastness of the cosmos to the particularity of an individual human life. It’s worth thinking about how all the different ways we have to talk about the world manage to fit together.
Sean M. Carroll
We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That’s not a hard thing to know. But that’s not what’s emphasized.
Sean M. Carroll
Something can be real – actually existing, not merely illusory – and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called ‘caloric’ that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.
Sean M. Carroll
There’s no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science.
Sean M. Carroll
The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can’t talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.
Sean M. Carroll