Sean Carroll

He says he grew up in the suburbs outside Philadelphia and attended public schools before majoring in astronomy at Villanova University, where he realized he most wanted to think about black holes, particle physics and cosmology.⁠[1]

He earned a PhD in astronomy from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry in 1993 under George Field, then held postdoctoral posts at MIT and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara before serving as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago from 1999 to 2006.⁠[2]

In June 2003 he, Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner proposed that tiny corrections of the form R^n with negative n in the action of general relativity could produce cosmic acceleration without dark energy, though without solving the cosmological constant problem.⁠[3]

In October 2004 he and Jennifer Chen suggested that spontaneous eternal inflation could provide a natural explanation for the thermodynamic arrow of time.⁠[4]

He was not granted tenure at Chicago, for reasons he says remain mysterious to him, and moved to the California Institute of Technology as a research professor.⁠[1]

In 2010 Dutton published his 438-page From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, which traces the arrow of time to the second law of thermodynamics and suggests universes whose arrows point the other way, giving the multiverse as a whole time symmetry.⁠[5]

On November 13, 2012, the hardcover of The Particle at the End of the Universe, his account of the search for the Higgs boson, was published.⁠[6]

In November 2013 the book won the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, worth £25,000 and presented in London by Royal Society president Paul Nurse; judging chair Uta Frith said the decision was unanimous.⁠[7]

The 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, on God and cosmology, featured a debate in which Christian philosopher William Lane Craig and he, as an atheist cosmologist, presented their views before more than 900 people; the exchange was later reprinted in God and Cosmology, edited by Robert B. Stewart.⁠[8]

On May 10, 2016, the hardcover of his The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself was published and became a New York Times bestseller.⁠[9]

From October 19 to 27, 2016, while at Caltech, he delivered that year’s Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow over five nights, under the theme The Big Picture.⁠[10]

On July 2, 2018, he announced the Mindscape podcast, consisting mostly of conversations with smart people about interesting ideas and occasional solo episodes.⁠[11]

He appeared as the guest of episode 26 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, titled “The Nature of the Universe, Life, and Intelligence.”⁠[12]

On September 10, 2019, the hardcover of Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, on the many-worlds interpretation and emergent spacetime, was published and became a New York Times bestseller.⁠[13]

He returned to discuss quantum mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation, covering the wave function, entanglement, Hilbert space, entropy, quantum gravity and emergent spacetime, time travel and his Mindscape podcast.⁠[14]

In July 2021 he moved from external professor to Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute; since 2011 he had been asking why complexity rises and then falls while entropy only increases, modeling cream mixing into coffee with Scott AaronsonScott AaronsonScott Aaronson is an American theoretical computer scientist, professor of computer science at UT Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center, who works on quantum computing and computational complexity theory, co-proposed the BosonSampling model, received the ACM Prize in Computing, and worked on AI safety at OpenAI from 2022 to 2024.Open the full entry and others, and he hoped to connect fundamental physics with higher-level phenomena.⁠[15]

In March 2022 he announced that he and his wife, Jennifer Ouellette, would move that summer from Los Angeles to Baltimore, where he would become Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University; he said his first visit to a university campus, for a Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth award ceremony in junior high, had been at Hopkins.⁠[16]

He arrived in summer 2022 after 16 years at Caltech, teaching a first-year seminar, “The Physics of Democracy,” that examines sociopolitical systems with the language of statistical physics, and working with philosophy professor Jenann Ismael to create a natural philosophy forum.⁠[17]

In September 2022 he published The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, inspired by his YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry lecture series of the same name, and held a launch event at Pioneer Works in New York on September 22.⁠[18]

On episode 428 he discussed general relativity, black holes and Hawking radiation, aliens, the holographic principle, dark energy and dark matter, quantum mechanics, AGI, complexity, consciousness and Einstein.⁠[19]

On May 14, 2024, the series’ second volume, Quanta and Fields, was published, at 304 pages.⁠[20]

His website says he is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, with his focus now on foundational questions in quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics; he hosts the weekly Mindscape podcast, often consults on film and television, and lives in Baltimore with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette.⁠[21]

Personal website: Public link: https://preposterousuniverse.com (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

X: Public account: https://x.com/seanmcarroll (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

YouTube: Public channel: https://youtube.com/@seancarroll (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

University of Chicago: Official website: https://www.uchicago.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

California Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.caltech.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Santa Fe Institute: Official website: https://www.santafe.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

Johns Hopkins University: Official website: https://www.jhu.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]