Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
All content for Big Think is the property of bigthink and is served directly from their servers
with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
The Universe in 90 minutes: Time, free will, God, & more | Sean Carroll
Big Think
1 hour 40 minutes
3 weeks ago
The Universe in 90 minutes: Time, free will, God, & more | Sean Carroll
Everything you ever wanted to know about parallel universes, time, entropy, free will and more, explained by physicist Sean Carroll.
Do you have free will? Is our Universe the only one, or do we live in one of many? And what does Einstein’s theory of relativity really say about the nature of reality?
These are some of the big questions that theoretical physicist Sean Carroll tackles in this Big Think video.
In 2022, Carroll published The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, a book that achieves that rare feat of detailing the inner workings of scientific concepts in a way that’s accessible but not overly simplistic.
THE MULTIVERSE
0:00 Sean Carroll, Johns Hopkins physicist
0:18 What is the Multiverse and what does it mean to us?
2:38 What is the physicist’s version of the Multiverse?
6:43 Is every possible world real?
9:22 Why should we trust the many worlds of quantum mechanics?
12:24 How many worlds are there?
14:47 How does personal identity in the Multiverse work?
16:43 Do our decisions create different universes?
20:25 Why are we drawn to the Multiverse and how does technology propel it?
TIME
26:33 What is time? (And entropy?)
35:52 What is the past hypothesis? (The laws of thermodynamics)
ENTROPY
41:32 Why is entropy essential to living?
44:33 Why are there complex structures in the Universe?
46:11 Do complex structures require design?
47:55 What is the effect of increasing entropy?
50:03 What is the difference between entropy and complexity?
52:52 What is emergence?
PHYSICS: GALILEO'S LEGACY
55:08 Why is physics such a difficult field to study?
ORIGINS OF LIFE
58:14 Is life a struggle against entropy?
1:00:36 What are the origins of life here on Earth?
1:04:52 How many things had to “go right” for us to exist?
1:07:33 If this isn’t God’s design we’re seeing, what is it?
FREE WILL
1:11:22 What is Laplace's demon and do we have human agency?
1:16:30 What are the different viewpoints on free will?
1:23:44 How do our feelings fit into the molecular world?
1:26:24 Are there objections to the compatibilist worldview?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About Sean Carroll:
Dr. Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy — in effect, a joint appointment between physics and philosophy — at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Most of his career has been spent doing research on cosmology, field theory, and gravitation, looking at topics such as dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, topological defects, extra dimensions, and violations of fundamental symmetries. These days, his focus has shifted to more foundational questions, both in quantum mechanics (origin of probability, emergence of space and time) and statistical mechanics (entropy and the arrow of time, emergence and causation, dynamics of complexity), bringing a more philosophical dimension to his work.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------11:10-18
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Big Think
Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
