Sean M. Carroll quotes - page 2

Sean M. Carroll is an American theoretical physicist, author, and science communicator known for his work in cosmology and quantum mechanics. His research explores the origins and nature of the universe, as well as the foundations of physics. He actively promotes public understanding of science through books, lectures, and podcasts. Here are 46 of his quotes:

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

As we get older, we tend to grow quite fond of the planets of belief we have constructed for ourselves. We build elaborate defense mechanisms to ward off attacks from competing ideas or new data. The system makes us comfortable but resistant to change, no matter how much change might be called for.

Sean M. Carroll

There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science.

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

Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.

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

Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there's the physical world and God. Naturalism says there's only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else.

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

I think it's important that science just doesn't stay within narrow boundaries.

Sean M. Carroll

What we're seeing is a manifestation of the layered nature of our descriptions of reality. At the deepest level we currently know about, the basic notions are things like "spacetime,” "quantum fields,” "equations of motion,” and "interactions.”.

Sean M. Carroll

Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It's not well-defined, it's completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding.

Sean M. Carroll

The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.

Sean M. Carroll

Just the idea that we, these little collections of atoms and molecules, are part of the world, but a part that can look at the rest of the world and figure it out in a self-referential way, is kind of breathtaking.

Sean M. Carroll

We are not important to the universe. That's the bad news.

Sean M. Carroll

God is not described in equations.

Sean M. Carroll

Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.

Sean M. Carroll

We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.

Sean M. Carroll

The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism-there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the "laws of nature,” and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. "Life” and "consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web.

Sean M. Carroll