Top 37 Sean Carroll Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.
Sean M. Carroll
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.
Sean Carroll
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. An elegant mechanism emerges: a broken symmetry, hidden from our view by a field pervading space.
Sean Carroll
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.
Sean Carroll
#25. Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously better.
Sean Carroll
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.
Sean M. Carroll
#32. (A substantial fraction of the atoms in the body of a typical physicist were once in the form of pizza.)
Sean Carroll
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it.
Sean Carroll
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