Sean M. Carroll quotes - page 2

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)
We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That's not a hard thing to know. But that's not what's emphasized. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there's the physical world and God. Naturalism says there's only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
I think it's important that science just doesn't stay within narrow boundaries. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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)
What we're seeing is a manifestation of the layered nature of our descriptions of reality. At the deepest level we currently know about, the basic notions are things like "spacetime,” "quantum fields,” "equations of motion,” and "interactions.”. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
We are not important to the universe. That's the bad news. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
God is not described in equations. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
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. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism-there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the "laws of nature,” and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. "Life” and "consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. View quote
Sean M. Carroll
What we're seeing is a manifestation of the layered nature of our descriptions of reality. At the deepest level we currently know about, the basic notions are things like "spacetime,” "quantum fields,” "equations of motion,” and "interactions.” No causes, whether material, formal, efficient, or final. But there are levels on top of that, where the vocabulary changes. (Sean M. Carroll)