Sean Carroll

Refusing to "trust the experts" is meant to be a brave, responsible position. But (as Carl explains in the thread) there is too much knowledge in the world. You have to trust *somebody*, much of the time. If you have no trust in experts, you end up trusting the idiots.

Calling out political extremists for being hypocritical (“they claim to value free speech, but actually try to censor speech they don’t like!”) is like calling out a football team for playing both offense and defense. They’re not trying to embody fixed standards, they’re just trying to win.

Let me try to explain why it's important to study the foundations of quantum mechanics. (1/n) (Have to do some breathing exercises, b/c to me it's blindingly obvious that "understanding the most important theory in physics" is something physicists should care about, but apparently opinions differ.)

What would you do alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine? (You've probably been wondering!) My JHU philosophy colleague Hanna Pickard tackles the question, here in a panel discussion celebrating her book launch. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOJE...

This year's Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture was by James Peebles, who talked about "A Physicists' Philosophy of Physics." Video is now up! www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjhC...

I could be one of the seven experts for at least a few of these.

Don't even know what to say at this point.

If you look closely you will see #MindscapePodcast featured in this announcement for "Prompted Playlists" on Spotify. newsroom.spotify.com/2026-04-07/p...

Lovely comic collaboration between Terry Tao @teorth.bsky.social and Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social, on what mathematicians are actually like. Less weird than you might think! Apparently they really care about oranges. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sphere...

Daniel Dennett’s Real Patterns in Science and Nature— new collected volume is now out. All chapters open access, including my paper with Acyuth Parola on what emergence can possibly mean. direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edi...

The voyage of the Katrin neutrino detector through the streets of Karlsruhe made for some amazing images.

Katalin Karikó will be @jhu.edu's 2026 commencement speaker. Excellent choice! www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2026...

We’re in the incredibly short period where you can pretend to do news by AIing it. The modality is parasitic on real news sources, which it’s killing off. We’ll be left with nothing but hallucinated slop.