Sean Carroll
Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.
Sean Carroll did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
Latest Bluesky
What they believe
-
The story that Einstein could not keep up with quantum mechanics is almost exactly backwards: his philosophical objections were correct and should have been taken far more seriously.
I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously about that.
youtube.comSaid 22 Apr 2024This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These one: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
19 October
17 October
16 October
15 October
14 October
12 October
5 October
28 September
21 September
14 September
7 September
31 August
24 August
17 August
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 20 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The story that Einstein could not keep up with quantum mechanics is almost exactly backwards: his philosophical objections were correct and should have been taken far more seriously.
I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously about that.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
The singularity of a black hole is not a place at its centre but a moment in your future: falling in, you run out of time rather than out of room.
Remember space and time are parts of one unified space-time, the location of the singularity in the black hole is not the middle of space, but our future. It is a moment of time. It is like a big crunch.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Life is not fighting the second law of thermodynamics; it surfs increasing entropy and depends on it to hold itself together.
Sometimes people think that complexity or life or whatever is fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, fighting against the increase of entropy. That is precisely the wrong way to think about it. We are surfers riding the wave of increasing entropy. We rely on increasing entropy to survive.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Show 17 more
The simplest explanation for why we have never noticed an alien civilization is that there are none out there.
But I think your intuition is right that it would’ve been easy for there to be lots of civilizations then we would’ve noticed them already and we haven’t. Absolutely the simplest explanation for why we haven’t is that they’re not there.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
A great filter is a weak explanation for the silence, because it would have to work every single time — one civilization with self-replicating probes could fill the galaxy.
That is absolutely possible. I’m actually putting less credence on that one just because you need to happen every single time. If even one, I mean, this goes back to John von Neumann pointed out that you don’t need to send the aliens around the galaxy. You can build self-reproducing probes and send them around the galaxy.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Listening for alien radio is the wrong search: a probe that sits and waits beats a signal that passes you by, so an artifact in our solar system is likelier than a message.
This is the 2001 monolith hypothesis. I would be less surprised to find a quiescent alien artifact in our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from an intelligent civilization.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
The Copenhagen interpretation taught to physics students is a God-awful mess; many-worlds is beautiful because it needs fewer ingredients and one equation.
If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Declining many-worlds because it extrapolates past what we can observe is methodologically respectable and still a failure of nerve.
And if you just wanted to be methodologically conservative and say, “That’s a step too far; I don’t want to buy it,” I’m sympathetic to that. I think that you’re just wimping out, I think that you should have more courage, but I get the impulse.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Physicists did not invent dark matter and dark energy to rescue their theories — they would much rather the answer were something cooler, and the data will not allow it.
I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists accuse physicists, like you say, of losing the plot because they need dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want dark matter and dark energy; I want something much cooler than that. I’ve tried. But you got to listen to the equations and to the data.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Judging an AI by how close it is to a human is the mistake: appreciating what it can actually do is both more accurate and better protection against its dangers.
And rather than trying to ask, how close is it to being a human-like intelligent, we should appreciate it for what its capabilities are, and that will both be more accurate and help us put it to work and protect us from the dangers better rather than always anthropomorphizing it.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
A language model's apparent mind is mostly our own bias: it predicts text, and leverages our evolved habit of attributing intentionality to anything that acts human.
What a large language model is trying to do is to predict text. That’s what it does. And it is leveraging the fact that we human beings for very good evolutionary biology reasons, attribute intentionality and intelligence and agency to things that act like human beings.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
The largest contribution physics can make to AI is energy efficiency: computers waste heat hilariously worse than brains do, and nobody has seriously tried to fix it.
I think this is one of the biggest things that physics can help with, and it’s an obvious kind of low-hanging fruit situation where the heat generation, the inefficiency, the waste of existing high-level computers is nowhere near the efficiency of our brains. It’s hilariously worse, and we haven’t tried to optimize that hard on that frontier.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Consciousness and free will are not illusions: being emergent and non-fundamental is exactly as real as a table is.
That’s different than something being emergent or non-fundamental, but also real. This table is real, even though I know it’s made of atoms, that doesn’t remove the realness from the table. I think that consciousness and free will and things like that are just as real in tables and chairs.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Assuming you are a typical observer in the universe is not humility but a hilariously presumptuous claim that typical observers are like you.
But then you draw some conclusions from this, and what you end up realizing is you’ve been hilariously presumptuous because by saying, “I’m a typical observer in the universe,” you’re saying, “Typical observers in the universe are like me,” and that is completely unjustified by anything.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
"Why is there something rather than nothing?" cannot have the kind of answer why-questions usually get, because the universe is not embedded in anything bigger — it can just be.
I think that specifically the question why is there something rather than nothing? does not have the kind of answer that we would ordinarily attribute to why questions because typical why questions are embedded in the universe. And when we answer them, we take advantage of the features of the universe that we know and love. But the universe itself, as far as we know, is not embedded in anything bigger or stronger, and therefore it can just be.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
There is no philosophical knockout objection to the simulation hypothesis, and also no reason whatsoever to take it seriously.
I don’t think that there’s any philosophical knockout objection to the simulation hypothesis. I also think that there’s absolutely no reason to take it seriously.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Science can tell you how to reach your goals but never which goals are right — and it will help just as happily if your goals are horrible.
But there’s an instrumentalist view here, you have to first decide what your goals are and then science can help you achieve those goals. If your goals are horrible, science has no problem helping you achieve them, science is happy to help out.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
When somebody accuses you of being arrogant about an idea, almost all they ever mean is that they disagree with you.
Yeah, it is interesting because, when people react against you by saying you are being arrogant about this, 99.999% of the time, all they mean is I disagree. That’s all they really mean, right?
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
Einstein's equation is much smarter than Einstein was: it knew about black holes, gravitational waves and the Big Bang while he did not.
And the punchline is the equation is much smarter than Albert Einstein because Albert Einstein did not know about the Big Bang, he didn’t know about gravitational waves, he didn’t know about black holes but his equation did.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
The Nobel Prize is probably a net good for the world and a net negative for science, because it makes scientists want to win a Nobel Prize.
I think that Nobel Prize has enormous problems. I think it’s probably a net good for the world because it brings attention to good science. I think it’s probably a net negative for science because it makes people want to win the Nobel Prize.
Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 Said 22 Apr 2024
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 6 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Recommends The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics
If you're willing to roll up your sleeves and follow the authors along, this is a book from which you can learn a great deal.
preposterousuniverse.com 12 Feb 2013
What others say about The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics →
Liked The Book of Revelation
This book is a thoughtful examination of deep issues of identity, freedom, and obsession.
preposterousuniverse.com 26 Jul 2006
Loved Love in a Dead Language
This one is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii, who has written the best postmodern-pastiche novel I've come across.
preposterousuniverse.com 26 Jul 2006
Show 3 more
Loved The Wasp Factory
This was his first, and it's a masterpiece of twisted imagination. There's a surprise ending, but the convoluted path by which you get there has a terrifying internal logic.
preposterousuniverse.com 26 Jul 2006
Loved Thus Was Adonis Murdered
Caudwell has written a mystery novel populated by barristers of supernatural wit and cleverness, resulting in one of the most consistently amusing books I've ever read.
preposterousuniverse.com 26 Jul 2006
Recommends The Debt to Pleasure
A wonderfully dark novel, structured loosely around a series of recipes. You won't learn any new culinary tricks, but you'll be drawn into the wicked plotting of Tarquin Winot as he spins his schemes with considerable savoir faire . The first book I recommend to people I think highly of.
preposterousuniverse.com 26 Jul 2006
Where they publish
Site preposterousuniverse.com His personal site: blog, papers, books, courses and the Mindscape podcast.
Recent
- 371 | Kyle Harper on How Humans Have Shaped Life on Earth 19 Oct 2026 Humanity is merely one species out of millions living on Earth, but we have a disproportionate impact on the rest
- AMA | October 2026 12 Oct 2026 Welcome to the October 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who
- 370 | Daniel Akerib on a Faint Hint of Dark Matter 5 Oct 2026 One reason it's been so hard to directly detect the dark matter is that we're not sure what it is.
Show 7 more
- 369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will 28 Sept 2026 The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free
- 368 | Elizabeth Alexander on Why Democracy Needs Imagination 21 Sept 2026 In all sorts of ways, the modern world makes it difficult to nurture our individual humanity and connect with the
- AMA | September 2026 14 Sept 2026 Welcome to the September 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who
- 367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of Leaders 7 Sept 2026 The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people,
- 366 | Jim Al-Khalili on Time, Quantum, Biology, and Cosmology 31 Aug 2026 Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental
- 365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special 24 Aug 2026 Black holes, as Stephen Hawking discovered, do grow old: they emit radiation, lose mass, and eventually evaporate away. But our
- 364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure 17 Aug 2026 One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Blog Preposterous Universe Blog running since 2005 on physics, philosophy and books.
Recent
- Thanksgiving 27 Nov 2025 (Apologies for the ugly blog format. We had a bit of a crash, and are working to get the template back in working order.) This year we give thanks for a crucially important idea that can mean very different things to di…
- George B. Field, 1929-2024 5 Aug 2024 George Field, brilliant theoretical astrophysicist and truly great human being, passed away on the morning of July 31. He was my Ph.D. thesis advisor and one of my favorite people in the world. I often tell my own stude…
- New Course: The Many Hidden Worlds of Quantum Mechanics 27 Nov 2023 In past years I’ve done several courses for The Great Courses/Wondrium (formerly The Teaching Company): Dark Matter and Dark Energy, Mysteries of Modern Physics:Time, and The Higgs Boson and Beyond. Now I’m happy to ann…
Show 7 more
- Thanksgiving 23 Nov 2023 This year we give thanks for a feature of nature that is frequently misunderstood: quanta. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of mom…
- Proposed Closure of the Dianoia Institute at Australian Catholic University 18 Sept 2023 Just a few years ago, Australian Catholic University (ACU) established a new Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. They recruited a number of researchers and made something of a splash, leading to a noticeable leap in ACU’s…
- Thanksgiving 24 Nov 2022 This year we give thanks for Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of momentum, effective field theory,…
- The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion 21 Sept 2022 Just in case there are any blog readers out there who haven’t heard from other channels: I have a new book out! The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion is Volume One of a planned three-volume series.…
- Johns Hopkins 6 Mar 2022 As far as I remember, the first time I stepped onto a university campus was in junior high school, when I visited Johns Hopkins for an awards ceremony for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. (I grew up in an e…
- Thanksgiving 25 Nov 2021 This year we give thanks for something we’ve all heard of, but maybe don’t appreciate as much as we should: electromagnetism. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Stat…
- The Zombie Argument for Physicalism (Contra Panpsychism) 17 Nov 2021 The nature of consciousness remains a contentious subject out there. I’m a physicalist myself — as I explain in The Big Picture and elsewhere, I think consciousness is best understood as weakly-emergent from the ordinar…
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Bluesky @seanmcarroll.bsky.social His Bluesky account.
Recent
- Hello Pittsburgh! I am familiar with your TV show about agonizing medical situations 19 Oct 2026
- When coming across a claim that is entirely counter to conventional wisdom, perhaps one's *first* instinct should be "Hmm, I wonder if that goes away if we look carefully" rather than "Ooh, how juicily contrarian! Let's hype that shit up." 19 Oct 2026
- Mindscape 371 | Kyle Harper on How Humans Have Shaped Life on Earth. #MindscapePodcast 19 Oct 2026 preposterousuniverse.com
Show 16 more
- Most of this (don’t let one person dominate, listen actively, have fewer meetings), is pretty obvious, but stubbornly hard to enact. 17 Oct 2026
- Big step closer to identifying conscious perception in the brain, by Doris Tsao and collaborators. 15 times a second your neurons flicker between conscious and unconscious activity. Consciousness is found in time, not in space. 17 Oct 2026 biorxiv.org
- Hahahaha, LeBron James is a 76er! 17 Oct 2026
- Vote. Whatever inconveniences there may be, they are insignificant next to preserving democracy. Vote. 16 Oct 2026
- Sorry to hear that Jeffrey Goldstone has died. He was a giant of quantum field theory- pioneering our modern understanding of symmetry breaking- and later did great things in quantum information. I knew him at MIT as a gruff but friendly wise man. 16 Oct 2026 physics.mit.edu
- Baltimore's Mayors: not afraid to rank their predecessors. 16 Oct 2026 thebanner.com
- Sixers lead the league every year in "what team's level of success is toughest to predict?" 15 Oct 2026
- It really doesn’t say that, @quantamagazine.org. It’s worth getting it right, given your name! 15 Oct 2026
- Congratulations to this year’s Packard Fellows! Including Hopkins’s own Shari Liu. Such an important program. @packardfdn.bsky.social 15 Oct 2026 packard.org
- Repulsive, autocratic behavior. Well over the line for impeaching and removing everyone responsible. 15 Oct 2026
- Teaching my Philosophical Naturalism seminar again this semester. The last two weeks we’ve been asking whether “laws of nature” and “mathematical objects” exist independently of the physical world. Students seem to be leaning mostly “yes” and “no,” respectively, but I favor “no” on both counts. 14 Oct 2026
- Dammit, the AI agents have also gone rogue here in Charm City 14 Oct 2026
- Pittsburgh! On Tues Oct 20 I'm at Carnegie Mellon giving the Carl & Amy Jones Lecture in Interdisciplinary Science. It will be about the Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics. Hope to see you there. 14 Oct 2026 givecampus.com
- I'll admit I fell for this one. 13 Oct 2026
- The infinitely frustrating thing about this is that AI could help us cure cancer. There are good ideas out there, and machine learning is a useful tool. And these people are managing to somehow make even that prospect seem somehow unpleasant. 12 Oct 2026
- Exactly this. 12 Oct 2026
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
YouTube youtube.com/c/seancarroll His YouTube channel (Mindscape video, AMAs, lectures).
Recent
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Podcast Mindscape His weekly interview podcast on science, society and philosophy.
Link verified 4 Sept 2026.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.