Sean M Carroll Quotes

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.
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.
As we get older, we tend to grow quite fond of the planets of belief we have constructed for ourselves. We build elaborate defense mechanisms to ward off attacks from competing ideas or new data. The system makes us comfortable but resistant to change, no matter how much change might be called for.
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.
Even in empty space, time and space still exist.
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.
I think it's important that science just doesn't stay within narrow boundaries.
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.
If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!
I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.
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.
I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People don't realize how many aspects of our lives are touched in one way or another by not just the discoveries, the technological breakthroughs, but the process of science.
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.
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.
12next›last»
Total Records : 33

Related Books

Author Profile

Votes :
Rating :
AuthorName
Sean M. Carroll
Profession
Scientist
BirthDate
05 October, 1966
View Profile

Share to your friends..

Related Author

Adam Riess Al Seckel Alan Kay Alan Perlis Alan Stern Alfred Hershey Alfred Kinsey Alice Dreger Alice Hamilton Alice Weaver Flaherty Amory Lovins Andrea M. Ghez Andrew H. Knoll Andrew Taylor Still Andrew Weil Anita Borg Ann McKee Anne Wojcicki Annie Jump Cannon Anthony Fauci
view more

Popular Topics

Attitude Death Inspirational Life Love Motivational Nature Positive