Sean Carroll > Quotes

“We are part of the universe that has developed a remarkable ability: We can hold an image of the world in our minds. We are matter contemplating itself.”
― Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

“The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.”
― Sean Carroll

“The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it's up to us to make sense of it and give it value.”
― Sean Carroll

“Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously better.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“At heart, science is the quest for awesome - the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It's a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives.”
― Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

“As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn’t “go” anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it’s not “stuff”; it’s a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective, creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That’s us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“When we want something to be true, when a belief makes us happy—that’s precisely when we should be questioning. Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously greater.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life. Scholars who study meaning in life distinguish between synchronic meaning and diachronic meaning. Synchronic meaning depends on your state of being at any one moment in time: you are happy because you are out in the sunshine. Diachronic meaning depends on the journey you are on: you are happy because you are making progress toward a college degree. If we permit ourselves to take inspiration from what we have learned about ontology, it might suggest that we focus more on diachronic meaning at the expense of synchronic. The essence of life is change, and we can aim to make change part of how we find meaning in it.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, once offered the opinion that “life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“Way back in 1831, Michael Faraday, one of the founders of our modern understanding of electromagnetism, was asked by an inquiring politician about the usefulness of this newfangled "electricity" stuff. His apocryphal reply: "I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it".”
― Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

“If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas—than quantum mechanics.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The universe is not a miracle. It simply is, unguided and unsustained, manifesting the patterns of nature with scrupulous regularity. Over billions of years it has evolved naturally, from a state of low entropy toward increasing complexity, and it will eventually wind down to a featureless equilibrium. We are the miracle, we human beings. Not a break-the-laws-of-physics kind of miracle; a miracle in that it is wondrous and amazing how such complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen in perfect accordance with those laws. Our lives are finite, unpredictable, and immeasurably precious. Our emergence has brought meaning and mattering into the world.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“The idea of “Ten Commandments” is a deeply compelling one. It combines two impulses that are ingrained in our nature as human beings: making lists of ten things, and telling other people how to behave.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Biologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share studied a group of Kenyan baboons who fed off the garbage from a nearby tourist lodge. The clan was dominated by high-status males, and females and lesser males would often go hungry. Then at one point, the clan ate infected meat from the garbage dump, which led to the deaths of most of the dominant males. Afterward, the “personality” of the troop completely changed: individuals were less aggressive, more likely to groom one another, and more egalitarian. This behavior persisted as long as the study continued, for over a decade.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect was the work for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1905, and Einstein has another paper in the very same journal where it appeared - his other paper was the one that formulated the special theory of relativity. That's what it was like to be Einstein in 1905; you publish a groundbreaking paper that helps lay the foundation of quantum mechanics, and for which you later win the Nobel Prize, but it's only the second most important paper that you publish in that issue of the journal.”
― Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

“(A substantial fraction of the atoms in the body of a typical physicist were once in the form of pizza.)”
― Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: The Hunt for the Higgs Boson and the Discovery of a New World

“One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing the workings of the world is no longer thought to be in conflict with faith in God. I would like to argue against this trend, in favor of a more old-fashioned point of view that is still more characteristic of most scientists, who tend to disbelieve in any religious component to the workings of the universe.”
― Sean Carroll

“The ancient Greeks, according to Pirsig, “saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“When society puts some small fraction of its wealth into asking and answering big questions, it reminds us all of the curiosity we have about our universe. And that leads to all sorts of good places.”
― Sean Carroll, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

“Nothingness, after all, is simpler than any one particular existing thing ever could be; there is only one nothing, and many kinds of something.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. —Stephen Toulmin”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions.”
― Sean Carroll