Ep. 70: Sean Carroll

"This is the wonderful thing about physics. A very simple set of equations makes predictions that are hard to wriggle out of. So if General Relativity is right, with pretty good confidence you can extrapolate back in time to what was happening not at the Big Bang itself but to the first few seconds after the Big Bang."

Physicist Sean Carroll is here talking all things space and time. With a gift for explanations of complex subjects that anyone can understand, he addresses some of the issues we all wonder about from time to time. What was happening "before" the Big Bang? What is time travel? How does the influence of Einstein in a way reign supreme over the entire field of theoretical physics, even in the 21st century? Join this wide-ranging conversation as Sean Carroll and Daniel journey through our universe. It is thought-provoking and enlightening at the same time. 

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics, gravitation, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. He has wide-ranging interests, including in philosophy, complexity theory, and information.
Carroll is an active science communicator, and has been blogging regularly since 2004. His textbook "Spacetime and Geometry" has been adopted by a number of universities for their graduate courses in general relativity. He is a frequent public speaker, and has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report and Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has produced a set of lectures for The Teaching Company on dark matter and dark energy, and another on the nature of time. He has served as a science consultant for films such as Thor and TRON: Legacy, as well as for TV shows such as Fringe and Bones. His 2010 popular book, "From Eternity to Here," explained the arrow of time and connected it with the origin of our universe. "The Particle at the End of the Universe," about the Large Hadron Collider and the quest to discover the Higgs boson, was released November 2012. "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself" will appeared in 2016.

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