Sean Carroll

Physicist, Philosopher

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist, philosopher, author and educator. He has a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University, where his dissertation was on Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. He has worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was a research professor in physics at Caltech.

He is now is the Homewood Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Carroll has contributed to many science documentaries, and is the author of several great physics and philosophy books, including The Particle at the End of the Universe, The Big Picture, and Something Deeply Hidden.

Quotes by Sean Carroll

"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

"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

"The universe is incredibly more orderly than it has any right to be." - Sean Carroll

"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

"The idea of dimension in pop culture is sometimes misunderstood like there’s a place you can go, a mystical dimension or something like that. To a physicist or mathematician, a dimension is just a direction." - Sean Carroll

"If you believe that the atoms that are inside your brain and your body act differently because they are in a living person than if they were in a rock or a crystal, then what you're saying is that the laws of physics are wrong." - Sean Carroll

"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

"Quantum reality is a wave function; classical positions and velocities are merely what we are able to observe when we probe that wave function." - Sean Carroll

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

"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 idea that light is emitted in discrete quanta of energy related to its frequency is puzzling." - Sean Carroll

"To improve our current understanding of the laws of physics, we have to be open to the possibility that we're gonna invent more words, more concepts, and more ways of looking at the same universe, that help us recast those laws, extend them, generalize them, and go beyond what we currently know, into the physics that we don't yet understand but hope someday to do." - Sean Carroll

"The world is made of fields—substances spread through all of space that we notice through their vibrations, which appear to us as particles. The electric field and the gravitational field might seem familiar, but according to quantum field theory even particles like electrons and quarks are really vibrations in certain kinds of fields." - Sean Carroll

"The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it." - Sean Carroll

"The world is made of fields—substances spread through all of space that we notice through their vibrations, which appear to us as particles. The electric field and the gravitational field might seem familiar, but according to quantum field theory even particles like electrons and quarks are really vibrations in certain kinds of fields.
• The Higgs boson is a vibration in the Higgs field, just as a photon of light is a vibration in the electromagnetic field.
• The four famous forces of nature arise from symmetries—changes we can make to a situation without changing anything important about what happens. (Yes, it makes no immediate sense that “a change that doesn’t make a difference” leads directly to “a force of nature” . . . but that was one of the startling insights of twentieth-century physics.)
• Symmetries are sometimes hidden and therefore invisible to us. Physicists often say that hidden symmetries are “broken,” but they’re still there in the underlying laws of physics—they’re simply disguised in the immediately observable world.
• The weak nuclear force, in particular, is based on a certain kind of symmetry. If that symmetry were unbroken, it would be impossible for elementary particles to have mass. They would all zip around at the speed of light.
• But most elementary particles do have mass, and they don’t zip around at the speed of light. Therefore, the symmetry of the weak interactions must be broken.
• When space is completely empty, most fields are turned off, set to zero. If a field is not zero in empty space, it can break a symmetry. In the case of the weak interactions, that’s the job of the Higgs field. Without it, the universe would be an utterly different place." - Sean Carroll

Persons shown on this website are not affiliated with or materially involved with the ConscioCentric Paradigm. Their writings, teachings, publications or quotes have been influencial to the ideas of ConscioCentrism.

Sean Carroll

Quotes by Sean Carroll

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