Sean Carroll on Theoretical Physics and Interdisciplinarity

About this episode

This episode features Sean Carroll discussing the intersections of theoretical physics, science, and scholarship.

Ultimately, this episode is about science and scholarship. As Sean says, “understanding something as well as you can in science means that you need to confront the data and be pushed out of your comfort zone.” I find it counterintuitive but true: this episode shows us that theoretical physics and indeed science pushes us into the subjunctive. It’s our job as scholars to think beyond what’s given, beyond what’s happening right now around us, and think about what could happen, perhaps what would happen if certain constraints were lifted. If we suffered a mass extinction, what would life look like? If the mouth were configured differently, how would phonetic change have been different from the beginning? What about the uniformitarian hypothesis? If a language dies out and a new hybrid language forms, what are the possibilities and impossibilities? And then what happens when we think about this space of possibilities combinatorially vs. probabilistically vs. normatively? Among other things, Sean and I discuss the romance of the university, the merits of interdisciplinarity, his blog posts from 20+ years ago on Zizek, language, and metaphor—we inevitably touch on AI and writing—and…

People in this episode

Host: Talia Sherman

Guest: Sean Carroll

Topics covered

• theoretical physics
• interdisciplinarity
• public scholarship
• language
• possibilities in science

Keywords

• theoretical physics
• interdisciplinarity
• public scholarship
• language
• AI
• possibilities
• Zizek

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Johns Hopkins University

Books & works: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space

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