77 Quotes by Sean Carroll

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?

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

As far as quantum field theory is concerned, a human being or the center of a star isn’t all that different from empty space.

This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern.

The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.

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".

If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there's no reason to believe it.

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.

Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us.