{"id":3854,"date":"2016-05-08T16:16:27","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T23:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=3854"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:49:34","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:49:34","slug":"sean-carroll-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2016\/05\/08\/sean-carroll-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Sean Carroll Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Phil Torres talks to Sean Carroll, author of a book coming out Tuesday that I\u2019m greatly looking forward to, The Big Picture<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Salon: \u201cThe evidence is pretty incontrovertible that he doesn\u2019t exist\u201d: Stephen Colbert\u2019s favorite scientist on the universe, naturalism and finding meaning without God<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Torres writes,<\/p>\n

\nAmerican culture is deeply infused with an anti-intellectual distrust of scientific knowledge, a failure to understand the nature of peer-review, and an unwavering predilection for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
\n\u2026
\nAside from the existential importance<\/a> of understanding science, there\u2019s also a purely aesthetic issue. The scientific worldview offers, I would argue, a far richer and more elegant picture of the cosmos than any ancient myth or grand narrative conjured up by the human imagination during the Iron Age. As Charles Darwin would put it<\/a>, there is grandeur in this view of the universe<\/em>. And he\u2019s right. Consider a few nuggets of mind-boggling truths, courtesy of science\u2019s ongoing investigation into the arcana of reality: the cosmos has no center and no boundaries. The fastest moving organism travels more than half the speed of sound \u2014 and it\u2019s a plant<\/a>. You very likely have some DNA from an ancient Neanderthal<\/a> in your cells. Earth rotated faster when the dinosaurs were alive, meaning that the days used to be shorter. The universe is, in other words, an endless playground for curious minds.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve posted several times about Sean Carroll; here\u2019s a post from January 2015<\/a> with a link to a Sean Carroll talk that addresses many of his themes, with my own outline summary of key points. <\/p>\n

In this Q&A about his new book I like his notions of \u201cpoetic naturalism\u201d and \u201cplanets of belief\u201d, and his answer to the question of why you don\u2019t need God (or anything else) to serve as the \u201ccause\u201d for the existence of the universe. Carroll:<\/p>\n

\nIt\u2019s not true that every effect has a cause! That\u2019s just a convenient way of talking about certain features of the macroscopic world of our everyday experience, one that is not applicable to how nature works at a deeper level.<\/p>\n

When you want to tackle questions about the fundamental nature of reality, it\u2019s necessary to leave behind concepts of \u201ccause and effect\u201d and replace them with \u201cthe laws of physics.\u201d Those laws take the form of patterns relating different parts of the universe to each other, not relationships of causality.<\/p>\n

So a better question is: what does our best understanding of the laws of physics tell us about the origin of the universe, and why it might exist at all? The answer is \u201cnot much.\u201d This is a case where we have to be humble. The universe might have had a beginning, or it might have existed forever, we just don\u2019t know. There\u2019s certainly no reason to think that there was something that \u201ccaused\u201d it; the universe can just be.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phil Torres talks to Sean Carroll, author of a book coming out Tuesday that I\u2019m greatly looking forward to, The Big Picture Salon: \u201cThe evidence is pretty incontrovertible that he doesn\u2019t exist\u201d: Stephen Colbert\u2019s favorite scientist on the universe, naturalism … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,60,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-meaning","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3854"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3857,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3854\/revisions\/3857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}