Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
Something can be real – actually existing, not merely illusory – and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called ‘caloric’ that flowed from hot objects to colder ones. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
The idea that time is an illusion is an old one, predating any Times Square ball drop or champagne celebrations. It reaches back to the days of Heraclitus and Parmenides, pre-Socratic thinkers who are staples of introductory philosophy courses. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
I’m a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
A full understanding of what happens in our everyday lives needs to take into account what happened at the Big Bang. And not only is that intrinsically interesting and just kind of cool to think about, but it’s also a mystery that is not given much attention by working scientists; it’s a little bit underappreciated. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
I’m trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it’s interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It’s all because of entropy increasing. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
The particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can’t be done. That’s very likely the right answer. However, we don’t know for sure. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
Naturalism says that we were not put here for any purpose. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t such thing as purpose. It just means that purpose isn’t imposed from outside. We human beings have the creative ability to give our lives purposes and meanings. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. Sean M. Carroll Read Quote
