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Sean Carroll Books

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“Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions.”

ScienceHumanityHuman Nature
Author:Sean Carroll
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“If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?”

TimeUniverseSymmetryEntropyBig Bang Theory
Book:From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
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“Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas—than quantum mechanics.”

ScienceSkepticismQuantum PhysicsQuantum MechanicsScience QuotesCharlatansWoo
Book:The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
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“At a workshop attended by expert researchers in quantum mechanichs in 1997, Max Tegmark took an admittedly highly unscienfific poll of the participants' favored interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation came in first with thirteen votes, while the many-worlds interpretation came in second with eight. Another nine votes were scattered among other alternatives. Most interesting, eighteen votes were cast for "None of the above/undecided." And these are the experts.”

PhysicsQuantumEvrenMultiverseBilimKuantumFizik
Book:From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
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“Gone are the days—as recent as the first half of the twentieth century—when a genius like Italian physicist Enrico Fermi could propose a new theory of the weak interactions, then turn around and guide the construction of the first self-sustained artificial nuclear chain reaction”

SciencePhysics
Book:The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
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“To be honest, physicists don’t react with unalloyed approval when I tell them about The Particle at the End of the Universe. As far as we know there isn’t any “end” to the universe, either at some location in space or at some future moment in time. And if there were a location where the universe could be said to end, there’s no reason to think you would find a particle there. And if you did, there’s no reason to think it would be the Higgs boson.”

SciencePhysics
Book:The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
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