Quotes from Sean Carroll

The idea that "there's something we don't know," given a certain wave function, is an outdated relic of our intuitive insistence that what we observe is what really exists. Quantum mechanics teaches us otherwise.

it should; it's part and parcel of the machinery of quantum mechanics, and a number of clever experiments have demonstrated its validity in the real world.

If we zipped around at precisely the speed of light, we would never experience any duration at all, no matter how we traveled.

the lane to my left wasn't as far back as I thought. The very last inch of my back bumper caught the very front corner of the truck's cab. That was enough. I lost all control of my car, which executed a slow and stately counterclockwise turn, ending with my driver's side flush into the front of the truck, still speeding down the freeway. It was slow and stately from my perspective, anyway. I felt as if I were trapped in amber, watching helplessly as my car moved of its own

So either closed timelike curves can't exist, or big macroscopic things can't travel on truly closed paths through spacetime—or everything we think we know about thermodynamics is wrong.

Rocky Kolb has put it, "To compare the accomplishment of Newton to that of the first manned flight, one would have to imagine Orville and Wilbur Wright pulling up on the sands of Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, behind the controls of a modern jetliner and flying off to New York."[*]

But along the way, that energy becomes increasingly useless. It turns into heat and noise,

STUDYING TIME MACHINES IN FLATLAND

Creationists just plain refuse to see it.

If any particle we haven't yet found lasted long enough and interacted with ordinary matter with sufficient strength that it could possibly affect the physics of everyday goings-on, we would have produced it in experiments by now. One

But while only a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe appears to be in black holes, they contain a huge amount of entropy. A single supermassive black hole, a million times the mass of the Sun, has an entropy according to the Bekenstein-Hawking formula of 1090. That's a hundred times larger than all of the nongravitational entropy in all the matter and radiation in the observable universe.242

Close analysis of starlight revealed that stars are made of the same kinds of atoms as we find here on Earth, with Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin eventually proving that they are mostly hydrogen and helium.

The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a simple motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is.

The best we can do is to predict the probability of seeing the electron in any particular location or with any particular velocity.

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

When we see a planet being "deflected by the force of gravity," Einstein says it is really just traveling in a straight line.

The new feature of quantum mechanics is the duplication of that pattern when the wave function branches. That's no reason to panic. We just have to adjust our notion of personal identity through time to account for a situation that we never had reason to contemplate over the millennia of pre-scientific human evolution.

As far as quantum field theory is concerned, a human being or the center of a star isn't all that different from empty space.

As the reducibly complex mousetrap reminds us, we shouldn't let the intimidating sophistication of the final product trick us into thinking that it couldn't have come about via numerous small steps.

The real universe is nothing like that. It's more like an annoying child who likes to approach people and say, "I know what's going to happen to you next!" Then, when you ask what will happen, the child says, "I can't tell you." And after it happens, they say, "See? I knew that was going to happen!" That's the universe for you.

What bugs us, or should, is our lack of understanding about what is actually happening.

If there were some nefarious conspiracy to make the world look quantum-mechanical, it had to have been set up hundreds of years ago, when the light left those stars. It's possible, but doesn't seem likely.

We could be living in a computer simulation like in The Matrix, and the true external reality could be something very different than we suppose.

should also worry that he is being dreamed. (In the Hindu Vedanta tradition, all the world is a dream of Brahma.)