Sean Carroll: Children, Philosophy & the Meaning of Life

So Sean, I now come to the most exciting portion of the interview where I get to ask my own existential questions that we call the Fantastic Four or the Quintessential Quattro. I think that if you have quintessential, it should be five questions. That's what quintessence means. So alliteration is trumped by numerical accuracy. You're the perfect person to point out that error. Thank you, Sean. Okay, so now we're going to break and do these questions. All right, these are questions I ask you about existential meaning and reality of yourself, advice to your former self, and what you think is going to happen in the future, kind of loosely related to Sir Arthur C. Clarke's various laws. Okay, the first one comes down to the following. When you depart this mortal coil, and you're one of the few physicists that quotes from Shakespeare in some of his papers, I find that quite delightful. But as you spring forth at the biblically ordained age for the righteous, 120 years old, the age Moses got to when he failed to reach the promised land, what do you want to put in your ethical will? Not your material will. It's a concept in Hebrew known as the Zava'ah. It's basically the wisdom or teachings you want to pass on, not just to your biological errors, of which you don't have any, as far as I know. We'll get to that, maybe. But to your ideological errors, of which you undoubtedly have millions around the world. What advice, ethically or wisdom-based, would you like to give? You know, it's always a—I'm torn, because I don't think advice works, but I think it's kind of necessary to give it. You know, I mean, I think that advice doesn't work because some wise person says something, and some other person goes, oh, that's true, I will do it. That's not just—that's the paradigm, but that's a failure for how advice works. Advice works if and only if it inspires you to think in a deeper way, right? Like, you go, well, you know, maybe I don't agree with that, but I see why they would say that, and let me think about it. And, you know, maybe that's the advice I would give. There's lots of different things that I think are true. My usual piece of advice is, to young people, don't wait for life to happen to you. Just think about what you want your life to be, and go out and get it. And, of course, this is—I'm preemptively giving the advice that I would give to my younger self, because that's what I think is important, like what I wish someone had told me. Like, I was very good at obeying the rules, and doing what I was supposed to do, and taking classes I was supposed to take, and things like that. But I just, you know, let the various parts of my education, my career, come to me, rather than shaping them actively myself. And I wish I had done more of the latter. Very good. Well, Sean, you don't have to answer this question, but I'm going to see if it's not inappropriate to ask you. I don't think you guys have kids. And I'm wondering, was that a conscious decision? Is that based on anything? Again, if you don't want to answer it, we don't have to. We can cut this all out. But the fact that you didn't have children, or don't have them, is that—was that by choice, or was it not? Yeah, no, it's clearly by choice. It wasn't a mistake. Or it wasn't because of biological impossibility. Jennifer herself is adopted, so that was always a possibility. So I actually just got asked this question on a recent Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape, and so I did answer it. Oh, I haven't gotten through the whole catalog yet. No problem. But what I like to do is distinguish between this sort of a personal aspect, and a universal moral aspect, right? And I won't go into what the personal aspects are. They're not that interesting. But my point is, there's no universal moral aspect for us. Like, Jennifer and I did decide not to have kids, but not because we think that was some moral imperative. It's bad to have kids. You know, we're antinatalists or anything like that. It's mostly because we were busy, and we had things to do. And the things that we were most interested in doing did not involve raising children. We love other people's children. We think it's great when they have them. Go for it. I'm a pluralist in having kids, like I am about many things. I think that some people should have them, some people shouldn't, and everyone should respect each other's choices. Very good. Okay, getting back to the Arthur C. Clark framed questions, there's a question that actually pertains to your former desk that you had at Caltech, unless you brought it with you. That desk behind you looks too new to be Feynman's desk. So Arthur famously said, insufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I like to tie this question into, you know, kind of the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, where there's these primates, these proto-humans on the savannah in Africa, and they come upon this monolith, and they kind of like hit it with a bone, and they do all sorts of things with it. But I want to ask you now to look deeper than 120 years into the future, into your crystal ball, and ask, what would you put on a monolith, if it was sort of a billion-year lasting time capsule? I'll remind you, Feynman answered this, he would write the atomic hypothesis. What would you put in or on, you know, besides the CD-ROM? You can't put that on. But what would you put to brag to aliens, or whoever finds us billionaires from now, have a little swagger about humanity? What do you think you'd put to captivate the magic of our technology? You know, it's an almost impossible question to take seriously. I know what you mean, I know the story of Feynman saying, you know, everything is made of atoms. But, I mean, was he just writing those words in English? Is that supposed to be helpful to people a million years from now? That seems implausible. So, probably you would want to draw a picture of something, I guess, right? I mean, you could draw a picture of the periodic table of the elements. That might be a good thing. I would even better love to draw a picture of the second law of thermodynamics, or general relativity, or something like that. But I don't know how to get those across in a simple, very good picture. So, I think that Feynman might have been right, you know, to think about matter as made of discrete units. Even though that's not fundamentally true, but it's a stepping stone to understanding things better. If I could somehow get an abstract concept across, it would be something like conservation of momentum, like they talk about in the book. I think that realizing the universe can run by itself, that left to its own devices, things would just continue on at a constant speed. That's really what opens up modern physics. Modern in the last 500 years, I mean modern. And so that's the one thing I would like to get across. I just don't know how to do it in a picture. Yes, all right, very good. Okay, you already answered my third law, Arthur C. Clark's third law, of the only way of finding the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. That's the name of the podcast. So we'll skip to the final question, which is a statement that Sir Arthur made. He said, when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are most certainly right. When they say that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong. I'm not calling you old, Sean, but what, if anything, have you changed your mind on in your work or in life? Well, let's first notice that this statement by Arthur C. Clark is complete BS. It's just equivalent, logically, to saying anything is possible, right? It's not really a very helpful statement, and certainly there's no empirical evidence behind it. It's just that there's a bit of smugness. Yes, and I think that Arthur C. Clark is being smug when he makes that statement a little bit. So including this statement is wrong. Exactly. I've changed my mind on lots of things. You know, I mean, the existence of a non-zero cosmological constant is something that I changed my mind about. You know, science is great for that because you do change your mind. You're forced to by the data, right? I changed my mind about philosophical things. I used to be a moral realist. I'm not anymore. I used to be utilitarian. I'm not anymore. I've changed my mind about what are interesting questions in physics, you know, because you do have to— I mean, interesting questions are ones that are not only ones you want the answer to, the ones you think you can make progress answering. And I've learned a lot more as I've grown in age and wisdom about what I think I can make progress answering. So yeah, all sorts of things. And I don't even remember them because I'm very good at just internalizing the new wisdom and just pretending that I've been like that all along. If it weren't for published papers, I would think that I'd never changed my mind. That's right. You can find Sean at Retraction Watch every week. So maybe the last question, Sean, if money were no object, what would the Mindscape project look like? What would your podcast look like? What would your kind of— how would it change things besides, you know, your G650, which I assume you're going to get by proximity to the powers— the halls of power in Washington, D.C. How would you— just focus on the podcast, maybe. How would you do things differently if you had unlimited funds almost to dedicate towards this project? Well, I think that— But not unlimited time. Not unlimited time. That's exactly what I was going to say. I mean, the bottleneck is time more than money. You know, the spirit of Mindscape has always been a shoestring budget. It's, you know, I'm not going to put too much time or money into it. I did, you know, splurge on a nice recording device and some nice microphone. And I realized, you know, that now that most of my interviews are remote, it's very hard to control the guests' audio. You know, that's a whole thing. If I had unlimited funds, I would promise to, you know, fly the guests to a real studio and feed them caviar if they would be interested in doing this. And so I would get much better audio quality. But otherwise, that's mostly it. You know, I think that the— given what the spirit of the podcast is, money is not going to be that helpful. You know, I would give back all the money to the Patreon supporters and not take ads, I guess. But like, even the Patreon supporters, even though they're giving money, I think that what they get out of it as being part of a community is more than like, oh, I get an ad-free version of the podcast, you know? And even with the ads, I get a lot of people saying, you know, could you include links to your advertisers on your website? Because some of them I actually want. You know, and so I've started doing that. If you go to preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast on the sidebar, I actually include links to the advertisers where you can get your 15% off Mindscape discount and things like that. So there's not a lot that I would change. I think it's a pretty good system. Yeah, no, it's working very well. Sean, I want to thank you and congratulate you on a number, you know, of different items, but especially on the new book, the biggest ideas in the universe, volume one, space, time, matter, motion. It's a wonderful, accessible book. I'm actually using it for one of my middle schoolers at home to learn about calculus. And it's a little advanced for him to learn about special relativity. Although he did have a lecture from Jim Gates in person when I was back at Brown on supersymmetry. But I want to congratulate you on this book, which he followed and he got some good pointers. I want to, yeah, congratulate you on this wonderful accomplishment and the great success. Wish you great success there on the East Coast, close to the halls of power. May you be a physicist on a hill there and influence the country towards the betterment of all mankind. Thank you, Sean, so much. My pleasure. And, you know, keep on the spirit flying there in Southern California with the surfing and the sunshine, which I know is your big deal. So we'll miss you. Thanks, Sean. Bye-bye. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.