Sean Carroll
@seanmcarroll
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Physics, philosophy, complexity. @JohnsHopkins & @SFIscience . Host, #MindscapePodcast . Married to @JenLucPiquant . Increasingly at Bluesky rather than here.
Joined February 2009
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I encourage everyone to switch to this alternative. For the moment, anyway, there’s a lot less racism and trolling, and it’s just a better-functioning site overall.
Bluesky opens to the public with choose-your-own-algorithm options
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If you think we only have so many covid cases because we do so much testing, it makes sense you would think you’re only losing the election because they keep counting votes.
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Stephen Hawking was the rare famous scientist who deserved every bit of his fame. A brilliant physicist and an inspirational person. And quite a character.
Physicist Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76, a spokesman for his family has said
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So sad about what's happening. I thought our country was better than this. We're rejecting a smart hard-working woman in favor of a buffoon.
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Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize for showing that black holes are an almost-unavoidable prediction of classical general relativity. Let's take a peek into what that entailed. 1/n
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My productivity algorithm is something like:
* Start to do something
* Remember higher-priority thing, switch to doing that
* Remember that high-priority thing is hard
* Do nothing
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Women astronomers have had lower success rates with proposals to use the Hubble Space Telescope. Until they finally tried blind reviewing (so reviewers didn’t know the identity of the proposers), and the discrepancy went away. H/t
@welt_woman
@HubbleTelescope
has, for the first time, conducted a completely blind review of telescope proposals- hooray!! The result - completely consistent success rates for men and women, in contrast to significant biases that they found in the past.
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Actual science would like a word.
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Sometimes I am reading about an interesting mathematical topic and my brain is exploding with the pleasure of new ideas, then I am confronted with the fact that I still can’t remember which is “concave” and which is “convex” and I am sad.
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It’s strange when a character in a fantasy story is all “I am a scientist! I do not believe in magic and spirits!” while evidence for magic and spirits is everywhere around them. Science is founded on empiricism. Physicalism is a conclusion we reach, not a presupposition.
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Always a pleasure when someone tells me "I used your textbook to learn general relativity, it was great," followed immediately thereafter by "I didn't realize you were still alive."
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I love my fellow physicists, and it breaks my heart that so many have convinced themselves it's "scientific" to ignore mountains of evidence establishing that women face real, systematic discrimination in our field.
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This seems like magic, but it’s just Fourier transforms (expressing a function as a sum of periodic functions). Which are a kind of magic, I admit.
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This is changing my life. Mathpix's "Snip" will let you screenshot an equation, and it will return the LaTeX code. Works passably on handwriting, and nearly flawlessly on pdf equations.
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Personal news: this summer
@JenLucPiquant
and I will be moving to Baltimore, where I'll be taking up a position as Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at
@JohnsHopkins
.
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After almost a century of quantum mechanics, even physicists still haven't quite absorbed the idea that things don't actually have locations in space.
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If you don't like protests in the streets, one good way to prevent them would be to eliminate racism, brutality, and inequality.
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Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at the end of the next academic year. Caltech is great, and I've known wonderful people there. They would be happy for me to stay (as far as I know!), but this specific position is no longer a good fit for me, so I've decided to move on.
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How can Momentum be trending? It’s a conserved quantity.
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My next book, Something Deeply Hidden (2019), will be about quantum mechanics, many worlds, and the emergence of spacetime. Pretty optimistic that everyone who reads it will understand quantum mechanics once and for all.
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Whew, finally figured out the theory of everything. I’ll tweet all about it later.
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I don’t think it’s very complicated. Taxing the rich isn’t equivalent to hating the rich or wishing they didn’t exist. We have to get past the idea that asking people to pay their fair share is somehow attacking them.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attending the $35,000-a-ticket
#MetGala
in a Brother Vellies gown blaring "Tax the Rich" is a complicated proposition.
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Tempted for my next paper to make the font size of each sentence proportional to my confidence that what I'm saying is correct.
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I'm told (via email) that Murray Gell-Mann has died at age 89. One of the world's great physicists, his contributions included the quark model, SU(3) symmetry, strangeness, the renormalization group, and the theory of neutrino masses.
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When Einstein wrote down this equation over a century ago, he didn't know it would correctly describe black holes, gravitational waves, and the first few minutes of the universe. Our best scientific theories are smarter than we are.
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Makes sense that Newton was born on Christmas. Classical mechanics is like Santa: a perfectly sensible beginner belief system to tide you over until you’re ready for the truth.
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I wish Donald and Melania Trump a full and speedy recovery. And I hope Joe Biden wins this election in an unprecedented landslide, so that the country can once again be governed by responsible grown-ups.
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There need to be more YouTube reaction videos, but instead of people listening to a song for the first time, they're reading a physics paper.
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How can you not be mad? How can the collusion of so many powerful people in the erosion of our fragile democracy leave you anything other than incandescent with rage?
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I kind of want to be a US Senator just so I can stage a fillibuster and spend 20 hours lecturing on general relativity and quantum mechanics, all recorded and broadcast by
@cspan
.
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I admit that illogical time-travel scenarios in movies bother me. But not as much as characters climbing out of bed in the morning with completely unwrinkled pajamas. Have some respect for the laws of physics, people.
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They say there are no dumb questions, but that's not true. There are dumb questions.
These questions aren't dumb at all, though. They're important questions that can and should be addressed in a decent algebra course.
Questions should be answered, not ridiculed.
@graciecunning
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Is it possible for a person to hold an opinion for good reasons, yet be unable to articulate what those reasons are?
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It sounds expensive to just give every person basic income, health care, education, and housing. But I suspect the overall economy would benefit enormously. Not to mention, you know, a lot less human misery.
“In Finland, the # of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.”
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Gang, my podcast - Mindscape - is happening, set to launch in July. Interviews lined up with physicists, biologists, philosophers, historians, psychologists, law professors, theologians, political scientists, chefs, movie directors, poker players. I'm excited.
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Got an email from a non-scientist offering me thousands of dollars to use my “leverage” to get their paper published in a major physics journal. Not sure how people think the system works, but that ain’t it.
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All of the Nobel Prizes in Physics for which general relativity played an absolutely crucial role. Einstein's theory is belatedly becoming central to modern physics.
1978 (CMB)
1993 (binary pulsar)
2011 (cosmic acceleration)
2017 (grav. waves)
2019 (cosmology)
2020 (black holes)
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I don’t have a Theory of Everything of my own, but if I ever develop one, I promise to call it Theory McTheoryface.
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I am in my office at
@Caltech
, sitting down to do work here for the first time in over a year. Just happy I didn’t forget my keys.
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It feels weird to go about your day when this is what other people’s days are like.
Absolutely shocking footage of a Russian warplanes firing missiles into a residential area in
#Ukraine
🇺🇦.
A child screams in terror.
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I almost argued with someone on Twitter today. Then I remembered that is never a good idea, so I didn’t. Currently calculating how many pints of ice cream I deserve as a reward for this good behavior.
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Oh no. One of the best physicists we had; one of the best thinkers of any variety. Steven Weinberg exhibited extraordinary verve and clarity of thought through the whole stretch of a long and productive life.
Steven Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel laureate for physics, died today. A delightful companion who loved theater, he could recite the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins by heart, and wrote profoundly about the mysteries of creation. He loved life and left it reluctantly. He’ll be missed.
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There it is: the first image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, four million times the mass of the Sun. From the Event Horizon Telescope, which is really a team effort of multiple radio telescopes here on Earth.
We finally have the first look at our Milky Way black hole, Sagittarius A*. It’s the dawn of a new era of black hole physics. Credit: EHT Collaboration.
#OurBlackHole
#SgrABlackHole
Link:
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Okay, entanglement and spooky action at a distance. Let me give you my version of the best way to think about it. One's mileage, as ever, is permitted to vary. (1/n)
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Empathy is the hidden dimension of rationality. Without it, it’s too easy to convince ourselves that our personal perspectives and biases reflect universal laws of nature.
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The surprise about global catastrophes is how slowly they creep up. Movies train us to expect dramatic events and panic in the streets.
The reality - climate change, pandemic, fascism - is disaster approaching gradually, and people shrugging as they ask “Is that really so bad?”
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If you claim to love America, but don’t respect dissent and protest, you’re missing what’s actually good about this country.
#TakeAKnee
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God: “I sent you a vaccine!”
Louisiana governor's office just sent out a press release calling for "prayers and fasting" to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
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Real talk: being a scientist is the best thing in the world. Trying to figure out how the universe works. There's so much to figure out! It never gets old.
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Be like
@shakira
.
I just graduated from my 4 week Ancient Philosophy course with the University of Pennsylvania (
@Penn
). I know... my hobbies are very impractical, but it took a lot of hours after the kids were asleep. Thank you Plato and predecessors for all the "fun" over the past month!
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One of my long-ago ancestors absorbed an archaeon to become the first eukaryote.
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How often do you read a sentence or paragraph and “hear” the words in your head, without actually absorbing any meaning because you’re thinking of something else? Or is that just me.
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Dark matter exists -- an occasional reminder.
The first evidence for dark matter came from the dynamics of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. But these days that is not our *best* evidence. 1/n
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Spare some anger for people who are doing bad things! Don’t use it all up on people who are trying to do good things in ways you don’t precisely agree with.
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Currently troubled by: do the laws of physics have an independent existence, or do they simply summarize what happens? Surely the latter. (What kind of existence could they have, independent of what happens?) But then why do they keep holding, day after day?
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Talking quantum mechanics with
@joerogan
! Why it's important to try to understand, and why it might lead us to many worlds.
#SomethingDeeply
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To me the single most important thing college does is to move people out of the same groups they’ve been in their whole lives, and expose them to a wide variety of different ideas. Job-training etc. is far less important.
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Pro tip for visiting physics departments: you know you are leaving the experimental labs and entering the theory group when the hallways suddenly acquire carpeting.
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Confused by people who think human-driven cars are naturally safer than computer-driven cars. Have you ever met humans?
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Does one eventually reach an age where one stops having the anxiety dream about not being allowed to graduate from high school because one signed up for a math class then never attended it? Asking for a friend.
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On Mindscape I often find that brilliant people doing biology/philosophy/neuroscience/etc started by studying physics.
It would be cool if grad/undergrad physics programs explicitly acknowledged that physics training is great for many careers, not just being a physics professor.
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The biggest self-created stumbling block in science/philosophy is when we invent a category to help make sense of the world, later learn more about the world, and then stubbornly insist on interpreting the world in terms of that category long after it ceases to fit.
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Those who are skeptical of the influence of philosophy on physics might contemplate the number of revolutionary upheavals in fundamental physics 1850-1935, when physicists were generally knowledgeable about philosophy, vs. 1935-2020, after the two fields had drifted apart.
🧐
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It takes Gandalf 77 years of "research" to verify that Bilbo's is the One Ring. And they tell me six months is a reasonable paper deadline, smh.
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Looks like the cover has been released! Snazzy.
Coming your way Sept 2022.
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We shouldn’t fool ourselves into mistaking the world as we experience it for the world as it really is.
The two are related, but the relationship is complicated, and it’s real work to figure it out.
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Nobel Prizes for black holes, well deserved!
Roger Penrose is the first *theorist* to win for work in gravitational physics since — well, ever. Even Einstein won for quantized light, not general relativity.
The observations of the BH in our galaxy are obviously amazing.
BREAKING NEWS:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2020
#NobelPrize
in Physics with one half to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.
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Of course people shouldn’t be hired if they have certain beliefs. I don’t want to hire professors who “believe” that students with red hair should be shot on sight.
Quit talking abstractions about “allegiance to beliefs” and have a real conversation about the actual beliefs.
Guy says DEI statements as a hiring tool is just way to screen candidates for “an allegiance to a certain set of beliefs.”
Grad students pen letter saying that shows he shouldn’t be hired since he doesn’t pledge allegiance to the right beliefs.
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Cannot get behind this operationalizing of ontology.
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Room temperature superconductivity achieved for the first time! A slightly chilly room, to be sure (59 degrees Fahrenheit). Also, the material has to be crushed between two diamonds. But still!
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In the long run, the ultimate winner of the Game of Thrones will always be Entropy.
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Quantum mechanics as we teach it in textbooks is not so much a “theory” as a set of rules dressed in a trenchcoat
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Hundreds of years from now, the United States will still be stained by the shame of having elected Donald Trump president.
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So many of Spider-Man's nemeses are scientists and engineers. Doctor this, Ph.D. that. Why is Peter Parker anti-science? There's more to the story here.
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It's hard to accept that so many people looked at four years of rule by an incompetent, narcissistic, authoritarian psychopath and said "more of that, please." A really ugly streak.
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The melancholy thing about our contemporary moment is the realization that values you took for granted — learning is good, democracy is important, bigotry is bad, fairness matters — were always rejected by a large number of people. Now they just say it out loud.
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The Biggest Ideas in the Universe! Informal videos in which I try to explain big ideas one by one. Here is the announcement and intro video:
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Finally reached that point in a young author's life when their name is in as big a font as the title.
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(1/4) The US has a bizarre inability to control gun violence.
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Acccuracy in labeling after security at Milwaukee airport.
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Epistemic pro tip: the fact that everyone is upset with you does not, in fact, indicate that you are on to something.
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Shots fired! "Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics. Worse, they don’t seem to want to understand it." -- me, in the New York Times
@nytopinion
#SomethingDeeply
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Too many people have political philosophies founded on the idea that other people are mostly bums who deserve to suffer.
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If and when grownups return to power in the US, one of the highest priorities should be to reform our elections. Uniform election days, secure voting procedures, early voting, same-day registration, no gerrymandering, etc. I can even dream about ditching the Electoral College.
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I hereby pledge that if I am ever banned from a platform, have a book contract cancelled, get disinvited from giving a speech, am blocked or unfollowed, have my feelings hurt, or am asked to leave someone’s house, I will not start ranting about the 1st Amendment.
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The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, & the Universe Itself is out Tues! What’s inside & why I wrote it.
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Millennia from now, the century 1850-1950 will be remembered for math and physics completely overturning our picture of reality. Electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, particle physics, relativity, infinity, set theory, mathematical logic, Turing machines...
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