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

Categorized in : You Think School People

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.

Sean M. Carroll

arrows time past

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.

Sean M. Carroll

understanding simple reality

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.

Sean M. Carroll

data understanding add

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

Sean M. Carroll

magic world

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.

Sean M. Carroll

atheist self ideas

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.

Sean M. Carroll

benjamin-button yesterday thinking

We are not important to the universe. That's the bad news.

Sean M. Carroll

bad-news news important

God is not described in equations.

Sean M. Carroll

equations

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.

Sean M. Carroll

understanding law want

There's no verbs before time itself exists, right? There's no popping into existence, there's no fluctuating, there's no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing.

Sean M. Carroll

quantum craziness verbs

There is no such thing as outside the universe, as far as we can tell.

Sean M. Carroll

universe

All the stuff we've ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe.

Sean M. Carroll

energy matter stuff

We are not significant on the cosmic scale.

Sean M. Carroll

cosmic significant scales

The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.

Sean M. Carroll

hours speed matter

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.

Sean M. Carroll

moments facts firsts

Even in empty space, time and space still exist.

Sean M. Carroll

still empty space time

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

Sean M. Carroll

you change time travel

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

together life science thinking

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

anything only god world

Naturalism says that we were not put here for any purpose. But that doesn't mean there isn't such thing as purpose. It just means that purpose isn't imposed from outside. We human beings have the creative ability to give our lives purposes and meanings.

Sean M. Carroll

human ability creative purpose