We are not significant on the cosmic scale. Sean M. Carroll More Quotes by Sean M. Carroll More Quotes From Sean M. Carroll The arrow of time doesn't move forward forever. There's a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then, once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there's no more arrow of time. Sean M. Carroll youuniversetimehistory I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself. Sean M. Carroll thingbigbelieverscience 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 lovedaimuniverseage I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. Sean M. Carroll questionunderstandtimetrying The particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg. Sean M. Carroll youfuturetimepast I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing. Sean M. Carroll growthinktimeremember 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. Sean M. Carroll placesprettyuniversedifferent 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 yougodskyscience 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 coolthinkunderstandingattention 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 backillusiontimephilosophy 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 experienceimportanttimeworld 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 somethingthinkrealhot Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon's interior comes not from direct observation but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Sean M. Carroll thinkknowgreenmoon Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there's no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. Sean M. Carroll facedielifeway 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 hard-workworklifedeath There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Sean M. Carroll everythingknowscienceideas One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we've taken this incredibly interesting subject - how the universe works - and made it boring. Sean M. Carroll howuniverseboringinteresting 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 knowhigh-schooluniverseschool Science is a way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age. Sean M. Carroll agelifescienceknowledge
