Sean M. Carroll Quotations

I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.

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.

I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.

If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a multiverse, then there's other places in this larger structure that have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could be pretty similar to what we have here.

I don't want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it's not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.

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.

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.

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.

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

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