How to Make Science Relevant to Everyone

Sean carroll is one of the world's leading popular science writers whose bestselling books include The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself and Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. His latest book is The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Quanta and Fields.

In this interview, Carroll explains how our understanding of the world around us has developed over time, how much stranger the world is than our "commonsense" perceptions of it would indicate, and how laypeople with no background in the physical sciences can begin to grasp and appreciate the deepest hidden truths about the Universe. Carroll is an eloquent spokesperson for the view that a godless universe can still be a poetic and beautiful one and that there may be more connections between the political and the physical than first appears.

Nathan J. Robinson 

It's possible to go through life, as many people do, in almost complete and total ignorance of physics, despite every single thing in your life depending on and being determined by it. And so when I told one of my colleagues that I was interviewing a professor of physics or natural philosophy—we can discuss what that means—they said, why would you talk to such a person on your Current Affairs program? At the beginning of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, you say everyday people should have a grasp of, should get to understand, and should know more things. So how do you take the familiar world around us to make it strange—take the mundane and make it weird and puzzling—to make people want to learn more? 

Sean Carroll

It's a great question. I think it's different for everybody. We should be thinking about this more systematically than we do as professional scientists and academics. And also, I don't think that every person needs to care deeply about physics. I suspect that they want to. I suspect that people actually think this stuff is interesting, and that interest kind of gets beaten out of them over the course of their secondary school and higher education experiences because we turn it into a list of facts you're supposed to memorize and tests you're supposed to take and things like that.

So I would say two things about sparking the imagination. One is connecting some of these crazy, big ideas to our everyday lives. They actually do matter. In my first book, From Eternity to Here, I talk about the arrow of time and the fact that we remember the past, but not the future. We can scramble an egg, but we can't unscramble it. These are things that are very familiar to us. The past and the future are different from each other. So why is that true? Ultimately, it's because of conditions at the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. The universe set us up for this kind of experience, and we're still living with the ramifications of that. It's in your kitchen every day, which I think is kind of awesome.

 And the other thing is to emphasize the fact that science is not a list of results. It's not even a list of theoretical speculations. It's a process. It's a process of learning about the world by being open to it, by hypothesizing all the different ideas that we can and then collecting data and winnowing down to the hypotheses that work. That's the scientific method, but it has vast applications. That's a good way to go through life about a whole bunch of issues, not just theoretical physics.

Robinson

Friend of the magazine Noam Chomsky often says that the beginning of scientific inquiry is the willingness to be puzzled by things that you're not naturally puzzled by, and the way he talks about that is language. And he says that his inquiries began with the question, why can we use language? Where does that come from? And isn't that strange? Isn't that weird? No other animals can do this. Why can we? And then trying to get to the bottom of something that is taken for granted. Now, you mentioned there scrambling eggs. So tell us a little bit more about this willingness to be puzzled, this taking of the seemingly obvious and making it very non-obvious or making it interesting or making it a kind of challenge to think about.

Carroll

Yes, I think a willingness to be puzzled is absolutely crucial, but then also a willingness to improve upon one's puzzlement. That is to say, to resolve one's puzzlement by being open-minded and looking at the alternatives. I think there are two easy places to live. One is thinking everything, and the other is thinking nothing. And science forces us to live in the in-between where we say, there are some things we know with pretty good confidence, there are other things we don't know, and how are we going to decide we're going to go out and look at it? We're not going to just use the force of reason. As great as it is, it's not enough to tell us what is going on. And that initial puzzlement that can come from anywhere. It can come from scrambling eggs, and sometimes it sneaks up on us, like the idea that you can scramble an egg but not unscramble it. That's a puzzle. Why? Why does it go in that direction of time, but not the other? Nobody asked this question 200 years ago, it was just taken to be woven into the fabric of reality. And therefore it wasn't something that we questioned, where we said, well, could it have been otherwise? It was people like Pierre-Simon Laplace and others who pointed out that our best understanding of the underlying laws of nature doesn't have a directionality to time. It works equally well forward and backwards. So in fact, there's a puzzle here we didn't even know that we should be puzzled about. So it's this ongoing dialogue between our ideas, our experiences, and everything that really drives us to ask these wonderful questions.

Robinson

So, why does time have a direction? It turns out to be an incredibly difficult and complicated question.

Carroll 

Super important, yes. And before, like in Aristotle's time, it would have been like, well, it just does, what do you want from me? 

Robinson

I think everyone gets handed down the image of Newton supposedly watching the apple fall from the tree. But then, when you start to think a little bit, you go, well, actually, if you're sitting watching an apple fall from a tree, there is a very profound question, which is, what the hell is happening here? If you're living hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that turns out to be a very fascinating and difficult thing. And the deeper you go, the more layers you unravel.

You talk a lot about the history of the development of our understanding of the world and how it has gotten more and more complicated. The simple has become very complicated.

Carroll

Well, it's become complicated in some ways because we know more. It’s a great feature of physics. I like to say that physics is hard because physics is easy. 

Robinson

Explain that. 

Carroll

The studies that we do in physics are literally about ripping the universe apart into its simplest pieces and analyzing them to death. And because we take this strategy, like an apple falling from a tree, how hard can that be? We can do it. We can get the right answer. We can't get the right answer to, how does the apple grow? We can make some advances there, but we don't have a perfect, pristine, predictive theory of that. It's too complicated. But the apple falling from the tree we can get exactly right. And because of that, when you get it exactly right, guess what? There are differential equations involved. There's calculus involved and things like that, and suddenly, exactly because we understand it so well, it seems a little intimidating.

Robinson

But perhaps you could take us back to some point in time at which we didn't understand some feature of the universe that we came to understand. I've always thought that a better way to introduce science to people, rather than the list of results and facts, is to study the history of how we came to know things because it's totally fascinating. Give us an example of something that may seem obvious that someone puzzled over, and then we finally figured out how it worked.

Carroll 

You're just asking for trouble here because I could talk for hours if we just stick to Newton, for example. It was the Age of Reason. It was the moment in history when people were switching from a mode of trying to think about God's thoughts and write them down to poking at the universe. Francis Bacon sat down with his friends and invented the scientific method, and they founded the Royal Society, and also the good people of London invented the idea of the coffee shop, which was crucially important for all these scientists to get together and talk over coffee.

At one point, talking over coffee, there was this group of Christopher Wren, the famous architect, Robert Hooke, a famous physicist who invented Hooke's law about springs, and Edmond Halley, the guy who discovered the comet and later became famous. And so they are friends and they had helped found the Royal Society. And they said, we're trying to understand if the law of gravity works in a certain way—can we recover all of the results of Galileo and Kepler and Brahe and people like that? Can we show that the planets should move in a certain way, in ellipses in particular? And they realized none of them were really up to the task mathematically. They had these intuitions, but there were some calculational chops that they didn't quite possess. And they said, we know who is good at this, Isaac Newton, but we all agree he's a jerk, and we're kind of afraid to talk to him. And so they kind of bullied Halley, who was the youngest guy there, to take the trip up to Cambridge.

Halley knocked on Newton's door and said, so we have this question: if there was a certain law of gravity, how would the planets move? And Newton's like, well, they move in ellipses. And Halley is like, Well, wait, how do you know that? And Newton says, Oh, I calculated it, I just didn't tell anybody. And then Halley cajoles him into writing something up, and then eventually it becomes the Principia Mathematica, the most important book in the history of humankind. He realized that this could be extended to a whole bunch of other things. It's that human side that is amazing. The apple story was one hundred percent fabricated by Newton to make him look better later in life. So, we scientists look at the universe, but we look at it in a very human way.