Quotes from Sean Carroll

Everyone knows what a time machine looks like: something like a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back. For those of a younger generation, a souped-up stainless-steel sports car is an acceptable substitute; our British readers might think of a 1950s-style London police box.76 Details of operation vary from model to model,

A police officer pulls over Werner Heisenberg for speeding. "Do you know how fast you were going?" asks the cop. "No," Heisenberg replies. "But I know exactly where I am." I think we can all agree that physics jokes are the funniest jokes there are.

We don't create the world by our actions, our actions are part of the world.

When you travel more slowly than the speed of light, you are moving mostly through time; if you were to travel faster than light (which you aren't about to do), you would be moving mostly through space.

The important distinction is not between theists and naturalists; it's about people who care enough about the universe to make a good-faith effort to understand it, and those who fit it into a predetermined box or simply take it for granted. The universe is much bigger than you or me, and the quest to figure it out united people with a spectrum of substantive beliefs. It's us against the mysteries of the universe; if we care about understanding, we're on the same side.

a straight line through spacetime, if you like—is the path of longest time between two events.

A person is a diminutive, ephemeral thing, standing smaller in comparison with the universe than a single atom stands in comparison with the Earth. Can any one individual existence really matter?

He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American 'consumerism' discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs' prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like

Extraneous motion decreases the time elapsed between two events in spacetime, whereas it increases the distance traveled between two points in space.

The right answer, whatever it may turn out to be, will more likely be phrased in terms of wave functions, Schrödinger's equation, and Hilbert spaces.

which have developed over the years with no specific purpose in mind, tend to be more flexible, multipurpose, and self-repairing.

C. P. Snow—British intellectual, physicist, and novelist—is perhaps best known for his insistence that the "Two Cultures" of the sciences and the humanities had grown apart and should both be a part of our common civilization.

Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you. —Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a simple rule that resolves all possible time travel paradoxes.83 Here it is: • Paradoxes do not happen.

argued for new ways of thinking about length and duration.

Cuanto más sabemos sobre el mundo, más pequeños e insignificantes para su funcionamiento descubrimos que somos.

Descubrimos que no somos los protagonistas principales de la vida en el cosmos, sino un minúsculo epifenómeno, que hemos florecido durante un breve instante sobre la ola del aumento de entropía que va del big bang al silencioso vacío que le espera al futuro universo.

They then build detectors that patiently wait for the faint signal of a dark-matter particle passing through and perturbing a nucleus.

si realmente podemos esperar toda la eternidad, hasta las cosas más improbables acabarán sucediendo.

What started the ball rolling was a psychological conviction: the idea that something as horrible as these infant deaths couldn't just be random: someone must be to blame. There must be a reason why it happened.

la ciencia es un viaje en el que buena parte de la diversión está, sin duda alguna, en el trayecto.

No encontraremos propósito ni significado en las leyes de la naturaleza, o en los planes de ningún agente externo que hizo que las cosas sean como son; nos corresponde a nosotros generarlos.

Our best theories of people, presented on their own terms and without reference to underlying particles and forces, leave plenty of room for human choice.