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1 " 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
2 " 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 , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
3 " Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions. "
4 " Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us. "
― Sean Carroll , The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
5 " Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed. "
6 " If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it. "
7 " One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing the workings of the world is no longer thought to be in conflict with faith in God. I would like to argue against this trend, in favor of a more old-fashioned point of view that is still more characteristic of most scientists, who tend to disbelieve in any religious component to the workings of the universe. "
8 " Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect was the work for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1905, and Einstein has another paper in the very same journal where it appeared - his other paper was the one that formulated the special theory of relativity. That's what it was like to be Einstein in 1905; you publish a groundbreaking paper that helps lay the foundation of quantum mechanics, and for which you later win the Nobel Prize, but it's only the second most important paper that you publish in that issue of the journal. "
9 " The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it. "
10 " If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy? "
― Sean Carroll , From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
11 " The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a single motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is. "
― Sean Carroll , Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
12 " Quantum Mechanics doesn't deserve the connotation of spookiness in the sense of some ineffable mystery that it is beyond the human mind to comprehend. Quantum Mechanics is amazing; it is novel, profound, mind-stretching & a very different view of reality from what we’re used to. "
13 " ...si realmente podemos esperar toda la eternidad, hasta las cosas más improbables acabarán sucediendo. "
14 " Descubrimos que no somos los protagonistas principales de la vida en el cosmos, sino un minúsculo epifenómeno, que hemos florecido durante un breve instante sobre la ola del aumento de entropía que va del big bang al silencioso vacío que le espera al futuro universo. "
15 " No encontraremos propósito ni significado en las leyes de la naturaleza, o en los planes de ningún agente externo que hizo que las cosas sean como son; nos corresponde a nosotros generarlos. "
16 " Si nuestras vidas son breves y carecen de dirección, al menos podemos sentirnos orgullosos de nuestro coraje colectivo en nuestra lucha por comprender cosas mucho más grandes que nosotros. "
17 " 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. "
18 " Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously better. "
19 " 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. "
20 " The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn’t “go” anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it’s not “stuff”; it’s a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends. "
