People don’t realize how many aspects of our lives are touched in one way or another by not just the discoveries, the technological breakthroughs, but the process of science. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
Whenever you say you’re a physicist, there’s a certain fraction of people who immediately go, ‘Oh, I hated physics in high school.’ That’s because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we’ve taken this incredibly interesting subject – how the universe works – and made it boring. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
Science is a way of getting knowledge. It’s a method. It’s a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It’s a way that everyone can go through life; that’s how we should be teaching science from a very young age. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can’t talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
I’ve loved physics from a young age, but I’ve also been interested in all sorts of big questions, from philosophy to evolution and neuroscience. And what those fields have in common is that they all aim to capture certain aspects of the same underlying universe. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
Science isn’t just about solving this or that puzzle. It’s about understanding how the world works: the whole world from the vastness of the cosmos to the particularity of an individual human life. It’s worth thinking about how all the different ways we have to talk about the world manage to fit together. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
I think it’s important that science just doesn’t stay within narrow boundaries. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
As we get older, we tend to grow quite fond of the planets of belief we have constructed for ourselves. We build elaborate defense mechanisms to ward off attacks from competing ideas or new data. The system makes us comfortable but resistant to change, no matter how much change might be called for. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
There’s no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
