Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor and chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am delighted to be joined today by Sean Carroll. He is a professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of many books, including the biggest ideas in the universe series,

as well as the accompanying video series there, something deeply hidden, the big picture,

the barthicle at the end of the universe, from eternity through here and space time and geometry,

an introduction to general relativity. He is one of the leading public explainers of science

in the country, if not the world.

Sean Carroll, welcome to current affairs.

Thanks very much, Nathan.

Good to be here.

Okay.

Now listen, it's possible to go through the world, to go through this life, as many

people do, in almost complete and total ignorance of physics.

Despite every single thing in your life

depending on and being determined by it. And so when I told one of my colleagues, I was

interviewing a professor of physics or natural philosophy, which I'm going to discuss what

that means, they said, why? Why? Why would you talk to

such a person on your current affairs program? But what of the arguments that you make in the

beginning of the biggest ideas of the universe is usually, everyday people should have a grasp

of, should get to understand, should know more things. So I think the first task here is,

I want to, if you meet someone, as you probably do, who's like, why should I be interested?

Why should I care?

How do you take the familiar world around us to make it strange, take the mundane, make it

weird and puzzling, and to take people who walk through this world not thinking about

...