Quotes from Sean Carroll

There are tiny hints in the data that may indicate that this new particle is not just the minimal Higgs.

Looking for causes and reasons is a deeply ingrained human impulse. We are pattern-recognizing creatures, quick to see faces in craters on Mars or connections between the location of Venus in the sky and the state of our love life.

Calculating the relevant processes provides full employment for theoretical physicists.

So the energy per cubic centimeter is constant, while the number of cubic centimeters is increasing—the total energy goes up. In a universe dominated by radiation, in contrast, the total energy goes down, as each photon loses energy due to the cosmological redshift

Are you sure you're not a Boltzmann Brain? Or at least, do you know your local environment didn't recently fluctuate into existence? How do you know you're

treat measurements as fundamental, wave functions collapse when they are observed, don't ask questions about what's going on behind the scenes

signal of particles beyond the Standard Model, helping the Higgs decay into two photons.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. His most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. He is the author of From Eternity to Here and

Life is short, and certainty never happens.

To improve our current understanding of the laws of physics, we have to be open to the possibility that we're gonna invent more words, more concepts, and more ways of looking at the same universe, that help us recast those laws, extend them, generalise them, and go beyond what we currently know, into the physics that we don't yet understand but hope someday to do.

Information is physical.

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.

To understand why the Second Law works in our real world, it is not sufficient to simply apply statistical reasoning to the underlying laws of physics; we must also assume that the observable universe began in a state of very low entropy

not a conclusion we derive from deeper principles. Straight lines in space are the shortest possible distance; straight paths in spacetime are the longest possible time.

Christopher Savage have calculated that in reasonable models, we expect about ten dark-matter particles to interact with the atoms in a typical human body every year. The effects of every individual interaction are pretty negligible, so don't worry about getting a dark matter stomachache.

Any possible vibration of a quantum field can be thought of as a combination of vibrations with different specific wavelengths—just as any particular sound can be decomposed into a combination of various notes with specific frequencies.

Utterly wrong, according to the AQM way of thinking. It comes from a stubborn insistence on thinking of an electron as a tiny classical dot zipping around inside of the wave function, rather than the electron actually being the wave function.

Fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, the region of space we can directly see is populated by a few hundred billion galaxies, averaging a hundred billion stars each. We

Part of the sting was taken away when the American Physical Society awarded its 2010 Sakurai Prize in theoretical physics to Hagen, Englert, Guralnik, Higgs, Brout, and Kibble—in that order, which seems to have been chosen specifically to make it impossible for anyone to complain. (Anderson might have reasonably complained.)

The most famous story about gravity involves Isaac Newton and an apple that supposedly fell on his head, inspiring him to concoct his theory of universal gravitation. (It's mostly famous because Newton himself couldn't stop telling it later in life, in an unnecessary attempt to add some extra juice to his reputation as a genius.)

At each moment, who we are and how we behave is a choice that we individually make. The challenges are real; the opportunities are incredible.

On the other hand, in the memorable words of Richard Feynman, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

the key concept that ensures reversibility is conservation of information—if the information needed to specify the state of the world is preserved as time passes, we will always be able to run the clock backward and recover any previous state. That's where the real puzzle concerning the arrow of time will arise.

The main trick is to define the four-velocity as a derivative with respect to the proper time Ï" along the trajectory, rather than with respect to the coordinate time t. We write the