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The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself 
The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World 
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time 
Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity 
The Higgs Boson and Beyond (The Great Courses) 
Mysteries of Modern Physics -- Time (The Great Courses) 
Dark Matter and Dark Energy (The Great Courses)
Author Archives: Sean Carroll
True Facts About Cosmology (or, Misconceptions Skewered)
I talked a bit on Twitter last night about the Past Hypothesis and the low entropy of the early universe. Responses reminded me that there are still some significant misconceptions about the universe (and the state of our knowledge thereof) … Continue reading
Posted in Science
89 Comments
Thanksgiving
This year we give thanks for an historically influential set of celestial bodies, the moons of Jupiter. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of momentum, effective field theory, the error bar, … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Space
17 Comments
Atiyah and the Fine-Structure Constant
Sir Michael Atiyah, one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians, has proposed a derivation of α, the fine-structure constant of quantum electrodynamics. A preprint is here. The math here is not my forte, but from the theoretical-physics point of view, … Continue reading
Posted in Math, Science
32 Comments
Mindscape Podcast
For anyone who hasn’t been following along on other social media, the big news is that I’ve started a podcast, called Mindscape. It’s still young, but early returns are promising! I won’t be posting each new episode here; the podcast … Continue reading
Posted in Personal
13 Comments
On Civility
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders went to have dinner at a local restaurant the other day. The owner, who is adamantly opposed to the policies of the Trump administration, politely asked her to leave, and she did. Now (who … Continue reading
Posted in Human Rights, Politics
60 Comments
Intro to Cosmology Videos
In completely separate video news, here are videos of lectures I gave at CERN several years ago: “Cosmology for Particle Physicists” (May 2005). These are slightly technical — at the very least they presume you know calculus and basic physics … Continue reading
Posted in Science
10 Comments
User-Friendly Naturalism Videos
Some of you might be familiar with the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop I organized way back in 2012. For two and a half days, an interdisciplinary group of naturalists (in the sense of “not believing in the supernatural”) sat around … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Science
55 Comments
Stephen Hawking’s Scientific Legacy
Stephen Hawking died Wednesday morning, age 76. Plenty of memories and tributes have been written, including these by me: “Stephen Hawking’s Most Profound Gift to Physics,” in The New York Times — a piece concentrating on black hole evaporation and … Continue reading
Posted in Science
31 Comments
Dark Matter and the Earliest Stars
So here’s something intriguing: an observational signature from the very first stars in the universe, which formed about 180 million years after the Big Bang (a little over one percent of the current age of the universe). This is exciting … Continue reading
Posted in Science
23 Comments
Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?
A good question! Or is it? I’ve talked before about the issue of why the universe exists at all (1, 2), but now I’ve had the opportunity to do a relatively careful job with it, courtesy of Eleanor Knox and … Continue reading
Posted in arxiv, Philosophy, Science
138 Comments