About Sean

I am Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, as well as Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. This blog is part of my larger web site.

With my physicist hat on, I’m a theorist who thinks about the fundamental laws of nature, and these days about philosophy and the foundations of physics. Some of my work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity, and the arrow of time. Recently I’ve been focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and complexity. My CV has links to all my research papers.

Other hats, summarized at my activities page, include writer, speaker, and thinker about things I’m not really credentialed to think about. I’m the author of seven books:

• Spacetime and Geometry
• From Eternity to Here
• The Particle at the End of the Universe
• The Big Picture
• Something Deeply Hidden
• The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion
• The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Quanta and Fields

and four sets of lectures from The Great Courses:

• Dark Matter and Dark Energy
• Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time
• The Higgs Boson and Beyond
• The Many Hidden Worlds of Quantum Mechanics

My avocational intellectual interests include a number of philosophical topics, largely under the rubric of naturalism. I sometimes act as a science consultant for movies and TV shows, and have been known to play poker when the opportunity arises.

I live in Baltimore with my lovely wife, Jennifer Ouellette, who is a writer learning science instead of a scientist learning how to write. We’re symbiotic.

For contact info and other details, see the bottom of my personal page.