The Problem With Quantum Mechanics - Sean Carroll - #126

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, yes, hello, humans. Welcome back to modern Wisdom. My guest today is Professor Sean Carroll, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Picture. And today we are talking all things physics, quantum mechanics, gravity, spacetime, all the easy to understand topics that you want to talk about at a dinner party. However, Sean is incredibly lucid, super articulate, and if I can understand it, you definitely can too. In other news, I've got some episodes coming up with Coon Smetze, behavioral economist, talking about time and how we make our decisions relating to time and money. I've got Naval Ravikant's brother Kamal talking about his new book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. That is going to be absolutely amazing, and I cannot wait to sit down with him. Ryan Fisher from CrossFit Chalk. Who else? Michaela Peterson is going to come on in the new year. Olly Marchon from Marchon Athletic will be joining me. So it is a stacked few months coming up. But for now, we're going to learn about what quantum physics is and how it all works and how essentially the world that you see around you is totally not what's going on. So yeah, prepare for your mind to be blown. Please welcome Sean Carroll.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist, especially in quantum mechanics, gravity and cosmology, research professor at the Department of Physics, the California Institute of Technology, and also the man behind the Mindscape podcast. Sean, welcome to the show.

**Sean Carroll** (1:57)
Thanks very much for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
Super excited to have you on. Been a little while since we've delved into physics on the show, so we're gonna have to get over a little bit of inertia, some audience and my inertia as well. And we'll kick start everything back off again, right?

**Sean Carroll** (2:11)
Inertia is part of physics, that's okay, we understand it.

**Chris Williamson** (2:13)
You are the man, if there was ever a man to get over some inertia, it's you right there. Before we even start talking about physics, Mindscape podcast, it's not been going super long, right? But you've had some insane guests, like Max Tegmark, Seth MacFarlane, the guy that, the family guy created like the voice of Brian and Stewie Griffin. That's insane.

**Sean Carroll** (2:35)
Yeah, no, it's been great. It's been like a year and a half. I've been very, very lucky in people saying it. Not everyone says yes. But I always wanted it to be one of the things why I wanted to do the podcast was just so that I could talk to intelligent people about things other than physics.
I've gotten some great guests and all over the spectrum. So yeah, it's been fun.

**Chris Williamson** (2:58)
Is that informing the direction of any more writing that you're looking at? Are you tempted to branch out into anything after having these conversations?

**Sean Carroll** (3:06)
I've always been tempted and I always do. So my previous book, The Big Picture, was very broad. A lot of philosophy, a lot of biology was in there. And my last book was pure physics. So the next book is not going to be pure physics again. I want to keep it mixing it up.

**Chris Williamson** (3:26)
Got you. So tell us about your last book, Something Deeply hidden. Why do you write it?

**Sean Carroll** (3:32)
Well, it's a book about quantum mechanics. And the world does not need another book about quantum mechanics for its own sake. There's lots of books out there of varying degrees of usefulness. One of the things I did for the book, you can see the results right in chapter one, is I went to Amazon and typed in the word quantum into the search bar and looked at all of the books that had quantum in the title, quantum healing and quantum leadership and quantum yoga. And it just goes on. And none of them have the Schrodinger equation or any differential equations at all in them. So I didn't want to just be negative, but I think that a lot of even the good books on quantum mechanics have this attitude of saying like quantum mechanics is really, really bizarre. It's mysterious. We'll never understand it. Look at how bizarre it is. And I wanted to kind of be the opposite. I wanted to kind of say, look, this is just science. It's perfectly understandable. Even if we don't understand it yet, there's no reason to think we can't understand it. And even though I have a favorite way of understanding it, what I really care about is the fact that it can be understood.