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Sean Carroll QUOTES

Sean Carroll QUOTES

81 " Passion for science derives from an aesthetic sensibility, not a practical one. We discover something new about the world, and that lets us better appreciate its beauty. On the surface, the weak interactions are a mess: The force-carrying bosons have different masses and charges, and different interaction strengths for different particles. Then we dig deeper, and an elegant mechanism emerges: a broken symmetry, hidden from our view by a field pervading space. It’s like being able to read poetry in the original language, instead of being stuck with mediocre translations. "

― 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

82 " But Waldegrave didn’t simply give up; he challenged the scientists to provide him with an understandable explanation of the role of the Higgs boson, one that would fit on a single piece of paper. He offered a bottle of vintage champagne to whoever came up with the best explanation. Miller and four colleagues managed to cook up an engaging metaphor that was deemed suitable by the science minister. All five got bottles of champagne, and of course the United Kingdom supported the LHC. "

― 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

83 " the real world, people are not completely rational, they don’t have common knowledge, they misinterpret one another, and they certainly don’t start with the same priors "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

84 " The Big Bang model seems like a fairly natural picture, once you believe in an approximately uniform universe that is expanding in time. Just wind the clock backward, and you get a hot, dense beginning. Indeed, the basic framework was put together in the late 1920s by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium "

― Sean Carroll , From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

85 " That’s how science works. We don’t “prove” results like we can in mathematics or logic; we simply add to their plausibility by accumulating more and more evidence. "

― 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

86 " Space itself is not fundamental; it’s just a useful way of talking from certain points of view. "

― Sean Carroll , Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

87 " If we pretend that the emission of gravitational waves were the only thing affecting the Earth’s orbit, it would take over 1023 years for it to crash into the sun. So perhaps the same thing is true for atoms: maybe electron orbits aren’t really stable, but they’re stable enough. "

― Sean Carroll , Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

88 " Everything we want to think about human beings has to be compatible with the nature and behavior of the pieces of which we are made, even if those pieces don't tell the whole story. Understanding what those particles and fields are and how they interact with one another is a crucial part of comprehending what it means to be human. "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

89 " Upon measurement, the wave function collapses. However spread out it may have been pre-measurement, afterward it is concentrated on the result we obtained. "

― Sean Carroll , Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

90 " The idea that light is emitted in discrete quanta of energy related to its frequency is puzzling, "

― Sean Carroll , Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

91 " Frank Jackson himself has subsequently repudiated the original conclusion of the knowledge argument. Like most philosophers, he now accepts that consciousness arises from purely physical processes: “Although I once dissented from the majority, I have capitulated,” he writes. Jackson believes that Mary the Color Scientist helps pinpoint our intuition about why conscious experience can’t be purely physical, but that this isn’t enough to qualify as a compelling argument for such a conclusion. The interesting task is to show how our intuition has led us astray—as, science keeps reminding us, it so often does. "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

92 " Short-term memories were associated with synapses being strengthened, while long-term memories came from entirely new synapses being created. "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

93 " Hope comes from imperfect information. "

― Sean Carroll

94 " There are two possibilities: one where the universe is eternal, one where it had a beginning. That's because the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics turns out to have two very different kinds of solutions, corresponding to two different kinds of universes.

One possibility is that time is fundamental, and the universe changes as time passes. In that case, the Schrödinger equation is unequivocal: time is infinite. If the universe truly evolves, it always has been evolving and always will evolve. There is not starting and stopping. There may have been a moment that looks like our Big Bang, but it would have only been a temporary phase, and there would be more universe that was there even before the event.

The other possibility is that time is not truly fundamental, but rather emergent. Then, the universe can have a beginning. The Schrödinger equation has solutions describing universes that don't evolve at all: they just sit there, unchanging.

You might think that's simply a mathematical curiosity, irrelevant to our actual world. After all, it seems pretty obvious that time does exist, and that it's passing all around us. In a classical world, you'd be right. Time either passes or it doesn't; since time seems to pass in our world, the possibility of a timeless universe isn't very physically relevant.

Quantum mechanics is different. It describes the universe as a superposition of various classical possibilities. It's like we take different ways a classical world could be and stack them on top of each other to create a quantum world. Imagine that we take a very specific set of ways the world could be: configurations of an ordinary classical universe, but at different moments in time. The whole universe at 12:00, the whole universe at 12:01, the whole universe at 12:02, and so on – but at moments that are much closer together than a minute apart. Take those configurations and superimpose them to create a quantum universe.

That's a universe that is not evolving in time – the quantum state itself simply is, unchanging and forever. But in any one part of the state, it looks like one moment of time in a universe is evolving. Every element in the quantum superposition looks like a classical universe that came from somewhere, and is going somewhere else. If there were people in that universe, at every part of the superposition they would all think that time was passing, exactly as we actually do think. That's the sense in which time can be emergent in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics allows us to consider universes that are fundamentally timeless, but in which time emerges at a coarse-grained level of description.

And if that's true, then there's no problem at all with there being a first moment in time. The whole idea of 'time' is just an approximation anyway. "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

95 " the lane to my left wasn’t as far back as I thought. The very last inch of my back bumper caught the very front corner of the truck’s cab. That was enough. I lost all control of my car, which executed a slow and stately counterclockwise turn, ending with my driver’s side flush into the front of the truck, still speeding down the freeway. It was slow and stately from my perspective, anyway. I felt as if I were trapped in amber, watching helplessly as my car moved of its own "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

96 " STUDYING TIME MACHINES IN FLATLAND "

― Sean Carroll , From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

97 " If any particle we haven’t yet found lasted long enough and interacted with ordinary matter with sufficient strength that it could possibly affect the physics of everyday goings-on, we would have produced it in experiments by now. One "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

98 " One of the older professors in the department didn’t find my talk very convincing and made sure that everyone in the room knew of his unhappiness. The next day he sent an e-mail around to the department faculty, which he was considerate enough to copy to me: Finally, the magnitude of the entropy of the universe as a function of time is a very interesting problem for cosmology, but to suggest that a law of physics depends on it is sheer nonsense. Carroll’s statement that the second law owes its existence to cosmology is one of the dummest [sic] remarks I heard in any of our physics colloquia, apart from [redacted]’s earlier remarks about consciousness in quantum mechanics. I am astounded that physicists in the audience always listen politely to such nonsense. Afterwards, I had dinner with some graduate students who readily understood my objections, but Carroll remained adamant. I hope he reads this book. "

― Sean Carroll , From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

99 " Close analysis of starlight revealed that stars are made of the same kinds of atoms as we find here on Earth, with Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin eventually proving that they are mostly hydrogen and helium. "

― Sean Carroll , The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

100 " an elegant mechanism emerges: a broken symmetry, hidden from our view by a field pervading space. "

― 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