What Newton and Einstein agreed on that our society doesn’t | Sean Carroll
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Up next, Sean Carroll explains the biggest ideas in the universe | Full Interview ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TBNJyztai0
Time feels like the most obvious, standard metric in our world – until you ask a physicist like Sean Carroll about it. Underneath our widely accepted perceptions of linearity lies a much more interesting and complex world.
Beneath these assumptions lies the most complex, unsolved question in physics: Why does time have any direction at all?
Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/sean-carroll-entropy/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
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About Sean Carroll:
Dr. Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy — in effect, a joint appointment between physics and philosophy — at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Most of his career has been spent doing research on cosmology, field theory, and gravitation, looking at topics such as dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, topological defects, extra dimensions, and violations of fundamental symmetries. These days, his focus has shifted to more foundational questions, both in quantum mechanics (origin of probability, emergence of space and time) and statistical mechanics (entropy and the arrow of time, emergence and causation, dynamics of complexity), bringing a more philosophical dimension to his work.
@przemek896
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
It's not the same in quantum physics. There is probability before and collapse after. You cannot undo this, because you will have probability again which can be different after collapse
@EarthCreature1
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
I don't understand the link between what he is saying in the video and the fact that the future has already happened 😅
The concept is explained very clearly, tho…
@jebaker2
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
I had no idea Al Gore knew so much about physics!
@ripsnort-d8z
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
It's unfortunate that 'law' was picked as the word for what we call laws of physics, because it misleads us into thinking those laws dictate how the universe behaves, when they don't dictate anything. What physical laws do is simply describe certain interactions and relationships that are always true. It's kinda like the difference between a governor on your accelerator which prevents you from going above a certain speed, and a speedometer that tells you your velocity. The governor controls. The speedometer simply describes. Physical laws are like the speedometer: they don't control, they describe — and calling them laws makes it difficult not to think that they actually control how the universe works. A better word would be pattern or principle.
@bardmadsen6956
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
But, Newton came up with the idea the world was stuck by a comet that caused The Deluge just as I do, but The Taurid Meteor Stream instead of Halley's Comet. Who cares about the other guy?
@SteveBull-tg8mi
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
Depends on what you mean by has already happened.
@KieranDevine
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
10 Billion years in the future is still the past 5 minutes after that.
@NorthernSeaWitch
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
So the future has already happened and we have no true free will. Understood, will proceed as determined.
@Eduardo-dd4un
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
🙄
@thetr3ntlane
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
@thetr3ntlane
0 seconds ago
In Goulthorpe quantum world of adding an observer where all rules are hardcoded, it’s also reversible… lost in translation in a world of my architecture is bigger than yours versus my robot is bigger than yours…
@MostlyBuicks
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
Just because the laws of physics and their math equations work both ways, that does not mean time does not move forward.
@maidanorgua
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
People write articles by writing and re-writing, editing and re-editing for hours or days. This man just speaks in coherent articles and book chapters in one shot, no uhms or likes or weasel words. That is just astonishing.
@MostlyBuicks
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
The future has already happened, and it turns out I am STILL not a millionaire.
@peopleschoice1457
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
If this was real we would atleast be able to go to future if not past but we can't therefore it's just hypothetical
@liamweavers9291
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
"There's no frame of rest you can measure"… What do you think mathematics is? It's the rest frame that we use to measure. Observation itself is a frame.
@fredericharmand
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
The direction of time is linked to causality, insofar as a given cause always precedes its associated effect for any observer. This has nothing to do with entropy.
@rodc8974
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
Sean Carroll's 20th Century thinking is out of date. GPS proves Newton’s Absolute Time and GPS proves that the Light Speed of the Signal varies (is variant, not invariant) depending on the direction of rotation of the Earth. The Sagnac effect is fixed to the stars and proves Newton's Bucket was correct. For GPS to work, every satellite clock must be synchronized to a single "GPS Time" this proves Newton's Simultaneity across the entire GPS system, this verifies Newton’s Absolute Time and the Sagnac Effect proves Newton's Absolute Space. Besides if things like Time Dilation were true the Moon after 4 Billion Years of Elapsed Time Dilation would be at a year or years ahead of Earth in future time!! The Artemis Mission just proved that not to be true and confirmed Newton's Absolute Space. 20th Century Mathematicians took over Physics turned it into Scifi and ruined it!
@Dagrizzb
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
The me that existed yesterday, watched this video today, in the future.
@AB-uf2si
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
Ни хрена не поняла но очень интересно.
@crawkn
May 12, 2026 at 9:10 pm
Time is not "absolute," it is entirely derivative, it is an observation of effects of causes. It has no meaning independent of causation. Time isn't reversible (even if your math is) because effects NEVER precede causes by definition. Come on, can we please stop debating utter nonsense based on math? Math is reversible, cause and effect are not, it really is that simple.
Comments are closed.