Sean M. Carroll Quotes

The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description.

The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.

Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It's not well-defined, it's completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding.

Just the idea that we, these little collections of atoms and molecules, are part of the world, but a part that can look at the rest of the world and figure it out in a self-referential way, is kind of breathtaking.

The fact that you can remember yesterday but not tomorrow is because of entropy. The fact that you're always born young and then you grow older, and not the other way around like Benjamin Button - it's all because of entropy. So I think that entropy is underappreciated as something that has a crucial role in how we go through life.

There is no such thing as outside the universe, as far as we can tell.

We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.

We are not important to the universe. That's the bad news.

God is not described in equations.

All the stuff we've ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe.

The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.

There's no verbs before time itself exists, right? There's no popping into existence, there's no fluctuating, there's no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing.

We are not significant on the cosmic scale.

Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.