Quotes from Sean Carroll

Everybody dies. Life is not a substance, like water or rock; it's a process, like fire or a wave crashing on the shore. It's a process that begins, lasts for a while, and ultimately ends. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity.

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.

It's possible that we are being watched and judged by a race of super-intelligent aliens, who will think badly of us and destroy the Earth if we allow ourselves to be cowed by frivolous lawsuits and don't turn on the LHC. When possibilities become as remote as what we're speaking about here, it's time to take the risks and get on with our lives.

All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world. Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.

When exactly does the "wave function collapse" take place? (So you're not kept in suspense, almost no modern physicist thinks that "consciousness" has anything whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics. There are an iconoclastic few who do, but it's a tiny minority, unrepresentative of the mainstream.)

Quantum Mechanics doesn't deserve the connotation of spookiness in the sense of some ineffable mystery that it is beyond the human mind to comprehend. Quantum Mechanics is amazing; it is novel, profound, mind-stretching & a very different view of reality from what we're used to.

Our goal over the next few chapters is to address the origin of complex structures—including, but not limited to, living creatures—in the context of the big picture. The universe is a set of quantum fields obeying equations that don't even distinguish between past and future, much less embody any long-term goals. How in the world did something as organized as a human being ever come to be?

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.

Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary. We are not the reason for the existence of the universe, but our ability for self-awareness and reflection makes us special within it.

There is a wide gap between admitting that we don't know everything about how the mind works and remembering that whatever it does, it needs to be compatible with the laws of nature.

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," and the sentiment is equally applicable today.

There is a famous joke, attributed to Einstein: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." I don't know whether Einstein actually ever said those words. But I do know that's not relativity.

Life ends, and that's part of what makes it special. What exists is here, in front of us, what we can see and touch and affect. Our lives are not dress rehearsals in which we plan and are tested in anticipation of the real show to come. This is it, the only performance we're going to get to give, and it is what we make of it.

So neurons talk to each other by squirting electrically charged molecules from the axon of one to a dendrite on another.

A hundred quintillion googols!

The neutron is a bit of a drama queen.)

Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us.

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

One is our tendency to give higher credences to propositions that we want to be true. This can show up at a very personal level, as what's known as self-serving bias:

It's only because the data force us into corners that we are inspired to create the highly counterintuitive structures that form the basis for modern physics.

Lederman is also a charismatic personality, famous among his colleagues for his humor and storytelling ability. One of his favorite anecdotes relates the time when, as a graduate student, he arranged to bump into Albert Einstein while walking the grounds at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The great man listened patiently as the eager youngster explained the particle-physics research he was doing at Columbia, and then said with a smile, "That is not interesting.

Rµv - (1/2)Rgµv = 8?GTµv. This is the equation that a physicist would think of if you said "Einstein's equation"; that E = mc2 business is a minor thing,

If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it.

Don't play Quantum Russian Roulette.