From Eternity to Here Quotes

“This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“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?”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“The ancient Greeks, according to Pirsig, “saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. —Stephen Toulmin”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“It’s possible that we are being watched and judged by a race of super-intelligent aliens, who will think badly of us and destroy the Earth if we allow ourselves to be cowed by frivolous lawsuits and don’t turn on the LHC. When possibilities become as remote as what we’re speaking about here, it’s time to take the risks and get on with our lives.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“the interaction of gravity with other forces seems to be able to create order while still making the entropy go up—temporarily, anyway. That is a deep clue to something important about how the universe works; sadly, we aren’t yet sure what that clue is telling us.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Rµv - (1/2)Rgµv = 8πGTµv. This is the equation that a physicist would think of if you said “Einstein’s equation”; that E = mc2 business is a minor thing,”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“There is a famous joke, attributed to Einstein: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” I don’t know whether Einstein actually ever said those words. But I do know that’s not relativity.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“(The neutron is a bit of a drama queen.)”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“The punch line is that our notion of free will, the ability to change the future by making choices in a way that is not available to us as far as the past is concerned, is only possible because the past has a low entropy and the future has a high entropy. The”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“The result is a complete fiasco. Our simple estimate of what the vacuum energy should be comes out to about 10105 joules per cubic centimeter. That’s a lot of vacuum energy. What we actually observe is about 10-15 joules per cubic centimeter. So our estimate is larger than the experimental value by a factor of 10120—a 1 followed by 120 zeroes. Not something we can attribute to experimental error. This has been called the biggest disagreement between theoretical expectation and experimental reality in all of science.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“A hundred quintillion googols!”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“The Big Bang model seems like a fairly natural picture, once you believe in an approximately uniform universe that is expanding in time. Just wind the clock backward, and you get a hot, dense beginning. Indeed, the basic framework was put together in the late 1920s by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“At a workshop attended by expert researchers in quantum mechanichs in 1997, Max Tegmark took an admittedly highly unscienfific poll of the participants' favored interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation came in first with thirteen votes, while the many-worlds interpretation came in second with eight. Another nine votes were scattered among other alternatives. Most interesting, eighteen votes were cast for "None of the above/undecided." And these are the experts.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“Reversibilitiy is based on conservation of information: The information required to specify the state at one time is preserved as it evolves through time.”
― sean carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“at a deeper level, our anthropocentrism manifests itself as a conviction that human beings somehow matter to the universe.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you. —Friedrich Nietzsche”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“The right answer, whatever it may turn out to be, will more likely be phrased in terms of wave functions, Schrödinger’s equation, and Hilbert spaces.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“(To a physicist, a “vacuum” is not a machine that cleans your floors, nor does it even necessarily mean “empty space.” It’s simply “the lowest-energy state of a theory.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“But while only a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe appears to be in black holes, they contain a huge amount of entropy. A single supermassive black hole, a million times the mass of the Sun, has an entropy according to the Bekenstein-Hawking formula of 1090. That’s a hundred times larger than all of the nongravitational entropy in all the matter and radiation in the observable universe.242”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Any possible vibration of a quantum field can be thought of as a combination of vibrations with different specific wavelengths—just as any particular sound can be decomposed into a combination of various notes with specific frequencies.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Obviously the correspondence needs to be nonlocal; you can’t match up individual points in a four-dimensional space to points in a five-dimensional space. But you can imagine matching up states in one theory, defined at some time, to states in the other theory. If that doesn’t convince you that spacetime is not fundamental, I can’t imagine what would.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“it should; it’s part and parcel of the machinery of quantum mechanics, and a number of clever experiments have demonstrated its validity in the real world.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“In quantum mechanics, no matter how many individual pieces make up the system you are thinking about, there is only one wave function . Even if we consider the entire universe and everything inside it, there is still only one wave function, sometimes redundantly known as the “wave function of the universe.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“According to quantum mechanics, what we can observe about the world is only a tiny subset of what actually exists.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“They were materialists, who hoped to explain the world in terms of objects obeying rules, rather than being driven by an underlying “purpose.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“Information is physical.”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here

“To understand why the Second Law works in our real world, it is not sufficient to simply apply statistical reasoning to the underlying laws of physics; we must also assume that the observable universe began in a state of very low entropy”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here