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Sean Carroll

30 quotes in 62 categories

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Sean Michael Carroll is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He was formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical

Quotes by Sean Carroll

“Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us.”

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“The meaning we find in life is not transacendent, but it's no less meaningful for that.”

Life

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“Our actual universe evolves to empty space.”

Empty space

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“This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the grip of an…

Existence

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“Nothingness, after all, is simpler than any one particular existing thing ever could be; there is only one nothing, and many kinds…

Nothingness

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“They then build detectors that patiently wait for the faint signal of a dark-matter particle passing through and perturbing a nucleus.”

Dark matter

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“Then we compare the predicted abundance of such a WIMP with the actual abundance of dark matter.”

Dark matter

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“It’s only because the data force us into corners that we are inspired to create the highly counterintuitive structures that form the…

Counterintuitive

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The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it's up to us to make sense of it and give it value.

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“If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand…

Courage

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“Our best theories of people, presented on their own terms and without reference to underlying particles and forces, leave plenty of room…

Theories

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“Christopher Savage have calculated that in reasonable models, we expect about ten dark-matter particles to interact with the atoms in a typical…

Dark matter

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“When society puts some small fraction of its wealth into asking and answering big questions, it reminds us all of the curiosity…

Community

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“If you believe that the atoms that are inside your brain and your body act differently because they are in a living…

Laws of physics

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“Life ends, and that's part of what makes it special. What exists is here, in front of us, what we can see…

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“The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a…

Judgment

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“The strength of the electromagnetic interaction, for example, is fixed by a number called the “fine-structure constant,” a famous quantity in physics…

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“What started the ball rolling was a psychological conviction: the idea that something as horrible as these infant deaths couldn't just be…

Death

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“Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused…

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“Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we…

Atheism

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“One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the…

Academia

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“Even if we don’t go as far as Descartes’s belief in an immaterial soul that somehow interacts with our body, it’s tempting…

Consciousness

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“Is time real? …In one sense, it’s a silly question. The “reality” of something is only an interesting issue if its a…

Clock

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“At a workshop attended by expert researchers in quantum mechanichs in 1997, Max Tegmark took an admittedly highly unscienfific poll of the…

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“Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect was the work for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1905,…

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

Space

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“We are part of the universe that has developed a remarkable ability: We can hold an image of the world in our…

Physics

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“At heart, science is the quest for awesome - the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the…

Adventure

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“Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary. We are not the reason for the existence of the…

Existence

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“Part of the sting was taken away when the American Physical Society awarded its 2010 Sakurai Prize in theoretical physics to Hagen,…

Theoretical physics

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