Sean M. Carroll

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

“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.”

“Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.”

“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.”

“If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!”

“The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can't talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.”

“We tend to talk about the world in a myriad of ways - a microscopic world of elementary particles, a biological world of organisms and evolution, a social world of morality and meaning. But it's all the same underlying world. That's the underlying theme of 'The Big Picture.'”

“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.”

“Someday, when the ultimate laws of physics are in our grasp, we may discover that the notion of time isn't actually essential. Time might instead emerge to play an important role in the macroscopic world of our experience, even if it is nowhere to be found in the final Theory of Everything.”

“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.”

“Whenever you say you're a physicist, there's a certain fraction of people who immediately go, 'Oh, I hated physics in high school.' That's because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams.”

“Even in empty space, time and space still exist.”

“Science is a way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age.”