Sean Carroll

@seanmcarroll.bsky.social

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Physics, philosophy, complexity. Johns Hopkins & Santa Fe Institute. Host, #MindscapePodcast. Married to @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social.
In May: Quanta & Fields, book 2 of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.
https://preposterousuniverse.com/

Posts Replies Media

I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting @harthanson.bsky.social in person, but I did have a great time briefly serving as a science consultant on BONES. Now I’m reading The Seminarian, and it’s so much fun. Recommended for anyone who loves rompy mystery novels. E.g.:

Ariel has been frustrated by the slippery nature of mathematical truth, and has decided to take it out on Kurt Gödel.

I may be a fundamentally frivolous person, but can't let politics get me down when the Sixers are dominating the offseason so thoroughly. Can't wait for the season to start!

#Caturday theme: catching rays.

Bonus interloper. Never know what you’ll encounter on the mean streets of central Baltimore.

Reply to

Joanne Freeman

House of the Aggressive Engineers

Just absurd. Like a committee of mosquitoes charged with keeping us safe from insect bites. The US’s new AI Safety board. There are other names, but mostly tech CEOs.

We rest safely knowing that our house is guarded by a fearsome predator.

Look at this juicy table of contents! Ideas that could all be in your brain, as early as next week. www.amazon.com/Quanta-Field...

Next week: Quanta & Fields book tour! Small but powerful. Check whether I'll be talking near you (or virtually on 5/14). www.preposterousuniverse.com/calendar/

In the house tonight

Everyone knows about the trolley problem, but I swear when I was your age almost nobody did. The phrase was coined in 1976! What happened around 2003 to inject it into popular discourse?

Ariel and Caliban share a birthday with Immanuel Kant. Remains to be seen who will have the greater impact on intellectual history.

So sad to hear Dan Dennett has died. Had an enormous impact on me and was a wonderful person. I was talking with him just a few weeks ago — had the pleasure of introducing him to David Wallace, another admirer. dailynous.com/2024/04/19/d...

Check it out! A real physical copy. Who says you can’t be a realist about quantum mechanics. Released to the world May 14.

Reply to

Sean Carroll

I happen to just today be recording the audio version of the upcoming Quanta and Fields, indeed the very chapter where we talk about the Higgs mechanism.

Congrats to (Philly's own) coach Dawn Staley and South Carolina on (another!) national championship!

Pretty decent Wikipedia page. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_St...

Reply to

Sean Carroll

Ariel and Caliban are famously friendly and cute. And our backyard neighbor Puck is as well. Science is right again.

Reply to

Sean Carroll

The upshot: differences between Republican election-believers and election-deniers.

This is just so disheartening.

Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social shows results from a survey of AI researchers. Can an LLM truly “understand” natural language? Opinion is precisely evenly split.

The cat author is correct.

Whose cat wrote this….

From a colloquium talk of mine, a list of big puzzles in fundamental physics today. It's tragic that understanding the foundations of quantum mechanics isn't usually included on lists like these. What could be more fundamental?

Mood

Reply to

Sean Carroll

A simple model, but it gives experimentalists something to shoot for! We predict a cutoff in the high-energy neutrino cosmic ray spectrum that is just above where current data can reach.

Our next Distinguished Lecture for the Natural Philosophy Forum at Johns Hopkins will be by Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute. It will be Tues 2/27 at 6pm in the Glass Pavilion, Levering Hall. "The Simplicity, Unity and Complexity of Life from the Biosphere to the Anthroposphere."

Reply to

Sean Carroll

A taste of what you’re missing out on.

I like to think David Hilbert would be pleased to learn that he made it into my publication wordcloud.

Here’s my Google Scholar word cloud (from shiny.rcg.sfu.ca/u/rdmorin/sc...) — how does yours look? 🧪