*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Sean-Carroll-on-laws-of-physics-and-the-meaning-of-life

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Sean-Carroll-on-laws-of-physics-and-the-meaning-of-life

Well, yeah, that's essentially what he said. There's no meaning to life apart from what we meaning we give it. Some people find that depressing. Some, like myself, do not. Let's just have a bit of craic!>> ^shinyblurry:

You'll notice he never actually gave a reason why one particular version of reality should be preferred to another. He gave an example of choosing to support gay marriage to create a fair and just society, which of course are value judgments about the ideal way to live. There is no reasoning as to why we should make those judgments in the first place. All he said was, if you realize that we are the final arbiters of right and wrong (which isn't true, but for the sake of argument I'll concede this), "chances are" that you would be more apt to choose gay marriage than not. That is simply another unsubstantiated value judgment, and does not provide a foundation of reasoning to support the conclusion; namely, that we can derive meaning and purpose from telling stories about molecules in motion. That this idea of extracting meaning from cold, dead matter will ever be anything more than a morass of personal preferences arbitrarily defined by a group consensus, the definition being subject to change at any time according to the whims of its members. I advance that if meaning itself is subject to our whims, then there is no actual meaning to anything after all, and the only solution left is nihilism.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Atheism, Science, Religion, Naturalism' to 'Atheism, Science, Religion, Naturalism, sean carroll' - edited by kulpims

Tags for this video have been changed from 'cosmology, science, yearlykos, Sean Carroll' to 'cosmology, science, yearlykos, Sean Carroll, physics' - edited by kulpims

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From Cosmic Variance
Predictions for 2012
by Sean Carroll

So you don’t enter the new year completely unprepared, here are my most secure predictions for 2012. Unlike other prognostication websites, these predictions are based on Science!

1. Freely-falling objects will accelerate toward the ground at an approximately constant rate, up to corrections due to air resistance.
2. Of all the Radium-226 nuclei on the Earth today, 0.04% will decay by the end of the year.
3. A line drawn between any planet (or even dwarf planet) and the Sun will sweep out equal areas in equal times.
4. Hurricanes in the Northern hemisphere will rotate counterclockwise as seen from above.
5. The pressure of a gas squeezed in a piston will rise inversely with the change in volume.
6. Electric charges in motion will give rise to magnetic fields.
7. The energy of an object at rest whose mass decreases will also decrease, by the change in mass times the speed of light squared.
8. The content of the world’s genomes will gradually evolve in ways determined by fitness in a given environment, sexual selection, and random chance.
9. The entropy of closed systems will increase.
10. People will do many stupid things, and some surprisingly smart ones.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Thanks for the quality!

In reply to this comment by Boise_Lib:
Sean Carroll a senior research associate in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology has a blog on the Discover Magazine website--Cosmic Variance--this is his take on this.
Brutality

Includes links to petitions and open letters for the resignation of Chancellor Katehi. As well as eyewitness accounts.
Did you know that chancellors make almost $500,000 a year--and are calling for increased tuition on the students they are there to educate?
*quality

Sean Carroll a senior research associate in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology has a blog on the Discover Magazine website--Cosmic Variance--this is his take on this.
Brutality

Includes links to petitions and open letters for the resignation of Chancellor Katehi. As well as eyewitness accounts.
Did you know that chancellors make almost $500,000 a year--and are calling for increased tuition on the students they are there to educate?
*quality

I've always wondered if you would not just pop up in the middle of empty space if you time travelled without compensating for the fact that the earth is moving through at what like 1500 M/s through the solar system? And the solar system is orbiting the galactic centre. And the galaxy is moving away from all other galaxies (or vice-versa) as spacetime itself apparently expands. It all depends on how you think about frame of reference WRT your model of time-travel.

Like in Back to the Future, they travelled 30 years at a time. And they appeared to "portal/shunt" as opposed to "tunnel". It seems to me on a gut level like a portal or shunt would probably just dump you into empty space a fraction of a light year behind or ahead of the solar system if you jumped 30 years. A wormhole (Doctor Who or Bill and Ted style) is easier to imagine as being connected to the same "place" (according to what frame of reference I can't mentally peg down) in both times.

>> ^MichaelL:

I love Sean Carroll! I was just at one of Skeptic Magazine's CalTech lectures with Sean in January. It was great! His book "From Eternity to Here: The Quest of the Ultimate Theory of Time" is pretty damn good. It uses a lot of diagrams to help illustrate some of the complexities of the subject and I highly recommend it, BUT, I don't recommend the audiobook because you loose all of the diagrams and the narrator is very dry.

His wife, Jennifer Ouellette, authored "The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Loose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse" which I also highly recommend.

He and his wife are really cool!