The biggest ideas in the Universe – with Sean Carroll



Join Sean M Carroll as he explores deep questions about the cosmos, laying out the framework of classical physics from Euclid and Galileo to Newton and Einstein. Watch the Q&A for this video here: https://youtu.be/mtUG1cRYXvU

Sean’s latest book ‘The biggest ideas in the Universe 1: Space, time and motion’ is available now: https://geni.us/V3Or
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Discover the ideas that revolutionised our view of nature and helped us gain a deeper insight into the workings of the Universe. In this talk, Sean discusses the laws of physics as you’ve never understood them before.

This livestream was recorded on 6 October 2022.

Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He won the Royal Society Winton Prize for his book about the search for the elusive Higgs boson, ‘The particle at the end of the universe’, and ‘The big picture’ was an international bestseller. Sean lives in Baltimore.


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38 thoughts on “The biggest ideas in the Universe – with Sean Carroll”

  1. Great to see him back in the RI. I wish other scientists would dare to show the real math behind these concepts. If you keep hiding them, things will never change. Bold move to explain the Riemann tensor in less then 53 minutes 😃

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  2. So I have worked out that the universe began with the separation of dimensions.

    If this I so then it explains how time and space can come from nothing and a starting point. Because dimension (or directions) aren't something you can touch but they are real.

    And spacetime is the connection and fluctuations of the linking of dimensions.

    And black holes are the recompression of dimensions which is why time slows down till it reaches a singularity and it stops when all dimension in that spot are back together.

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  3. Awesome job explaining. I actually hung with the math. Please help…. I still don’t understand why curved space time causes me to feel accelerated toward the earth.

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  4. A very well put together lecture for everybody to understand. My biggest aim is to give people the chance to compete in events who never did good at school or sport. This is a very good general knowledge lecture and so are a lot of the other lectures from The Royal Institution.

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  5. Sean Carrol is by far the best communicator I have heard in high- level physics. The formulas in this are over most people's heads but do not hesitate to look at Carroll's other lectures, he always brings some good information for every level of viewer.

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  6. Well done prof. Carroll! I like your simplification way through GR.

    I think that the geometrical meaning of Ricci's tensor and scalar should be better explained (in general). Possibly as the first "Taylor terms" (constant and first linear term) of the expansion of the "curvature state". Probably Geometric Algebra could help. I think that the full Riemann's tensor is unnecessary and cumbersome.
    Have a beautiful day!!

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  7. I was a little thrown by the references to the twin paradox and had a look through the comments to see if anyone else had mentioned it, but alas no.

    The twin paradox became well known from carl sagan's presentations but has since been critised. The problem as I understand it, is that any effects to due special relativity on your outbound journey from your twin, cancel out on the return journey. The reason, for example, that GPS satellites keep different time is due to general relativity and the fact they are further from the centre of the earth and therefore in lower gravity than on the surface – not because they are moving around the earth.

    In Interstellar, the aging affects were due to proximity to a black hole (though I think the maths was off for the sake of the storyline) not because they travelled at near light-speed. What was Sean trying to say with his referencing to the twin paradox?

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  8. Sean Carroll makes me feel that Mathematical Physics, Tensor Calculus and GTR are not that difficult at all. I wish my professor in physics class made me feel that way, years ago! 🙂

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