Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

The arrow of time doesn't move forward forever. There's a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then, once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there's no more arrow of time.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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
Sean M. Carroll

Even in empty space, time and space still exist.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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
Sean M. Carroll

I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it's not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It's not there. So it's a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That's not a hard thing to know. But that's not what's emphasized.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can't be done. That's very likely the right answer. However, we don't know for sure.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

The particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg.

Sean M. Carroll
Sean M. Carroll

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
Sean M. Carroll

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.