Quotes from Sean Carroll

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.

The strength of the electromagnetic interaction, for example, is fixed by a number called the "fine-structure constant," a famous quantity in physics that is numerically close to 1/137.

The idea of "Ten Commandments" is a deeply compelling one. It combines two impulses that are ingrained in our nature as human beings: making lists of ten things, and telling other people how to behave.

The physical notion of determinism is different from destiny or fate in a subtle but crucial way: because Laplace's Demon doesn't actually exist, the future may be determined by the present, but literally nobody knows what it will be.

Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand–born experimental physicist who was as responsible as anyone for discovering the structure of the atom, once remarked that "all of science is either physics or stamp collecting.

The punch line is that our notion of free will, the ability to change the future by making choices in a way that is not available to us as far as the past is concerned, is only possible because the past has a low entropy and the future has a high entropy. The

That's what it was like to be Einstein in 1905: You publish a groundbreaking paper that helps lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and for which you later win the Nobel Prize, but it's only the second-most important paper that you publish in that issue of the journal.

Our actual universe evolves to empty space.

But Waldegrave didn't simply give up; he challenged the scientists to provide him with an understandable explanation of the role of the Higgs boson, one that would fit on a single piece of paper. He offered a bottle of vintage champagne to whoever came up with the best explanation. Miller and four colleagues managed to cook up an engaging metaphor that was deemed suitable by the science minister. All five got bottles of champagne, and of course the United Kingdom supported the LHC.

the real world, people are not completely rational, they don't have common knowledge, they misinterpret one another, and they certainly don't start with the same priors

The Big Bang model seems like a fairly natural picture, once you believe in an approximately uniform universe that is expanding in time. Just wind the clock backward, and you get a hot, dense beginning. Indeed, the basic framework was put together in the late 1920s by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium

That's how science works. We don't "prove" results like we can in mathematics or logic; we simply add to their plausibility by accumulating more and more evidence.

As a measurement apparatus interacts with a quantum system, the two become entangled with each other. There are no wave-function collapses or classical realms. The apparatus itself evolves into a superposition, entangled with the state of the thing being observed.

Space itself is not fundamental; it's just a useful way of talking from certain points of view.

The essence of a degree of freedom is that it doesn't depend on anything else.

If we pretend that the emission of gravitational waves were the only thing affecting the Earth's orbit, it would take over 1023 years for it to crash into the sun. So perhaps the same thing is true for atoms: maybe electron orbits aren't really stable, but they're stable enough.

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.

Upon measurement, the wave function collapses. However spread out it may have been pre-measurement, afterward it is concentrated on the result we obtained.

at a deeper level, our anthropocentrism manifests itself as a conviction that human beings somehow matter to the universe.

The idea that light is emitted in discrete quanta of energy related to its frequency is puzzling,

We might be able to guarantee that events along a closed timelike curve are consistent with the microscopic laws of physics, but in general they cannot be compatible with an uninterrupted increase of entropy along the curve.

That's the uncertainty principle. It's not that we can't know both quantities at the same time; it's just a fact about how wave functions work that if position is concentrated near some location, momentum is completely undetermined, and vice versa.

Short-term memories were associated with synapses being strengthened, while long-term memories came from entirely new synapses being created.

Hope comes from imperfect information.