Sean Carroll on how time and space began

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did time and space begin? From the age of ten, Sean Carroll has wanted to know. He first read about the big bang model of the universe as a child. Later, he turned down two job offers from Stephen Hawking. The big bang model of the universe is well established but, as Sean readily admits, the big bang itself remains a mystery. In the beginning, Sean applied Einstein's theories of relativity to this problem. But mid-career and painfully aware that trying to out Einstein Einstein was a tough call, he turned his attention from the very big to the very small. His most recent work imagines a universe without time and without space and describes how these two rather important aspects of our existence might have been created, using the laws of quantum mechanics and, in particular, the idea of quantum entanglement. Apparently it's quite straightforward. Things that are more entangled are closer. It doesn't explain the origin of time, however. Producer: Anna Buckley.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is to the BBC.
0:05.0	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.
0:08.0	First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
0:11.0	I'm Jemal Kiele and my mission is to interview the most fascinating
0:15.4	and important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.
0:20.4	We scientists are sometimes seen as being rather narrow-minded, tightly focused
0:26.2	nerds I suppose, but my guest today can hardly be accused of that. His specialist
0:31.1	subject is the universe and he's a cosmologist who cares about what it all means
0:36.2	Not just a physicist but for all of us
0:39.2	He isn't interested in applying established principles to existing data. He wants to reveal fundamental
0:45.2	rules about how the universe works. And he prides himself on entertaining every possibility,
0:51.2	often pushing the boundaries between physics and philosophy.
0:55.0	The American Cosmologist Professor Sean Carroll is the author of a host of best-selling books,
0:59.4	an extensive blog about our preposterous universe, and hundreds of scientific papers exploring the universe
1:05.1	both at the very grandest scales with questions about the nature of space and time and the very
1:10.1	tiniest of scales interrogating the weird and wonderful world of quantum
1:13.9	mechanics. I'd like to think of him as a cosmologist who maintains a very open mind.
1:18.4	Sean Carroll, welcome to the Life Scientific. Thanks so much for having me. Well, Sean, I think the one thing almost everyone knows about cosmology, I guess, is the Big Bang theory.
1:28.0	The idea that almost 14 billion years ago our universe exploded into existence but I know you've said
1:34.1	recently that the Big Bang doesn't mark the beginning of the universe it marks the
1:38.8	end of our theoretical understanding what did you mean by Well, it's unusual because we use the phrase, the Big Bang, to mean two very different things.
1:47.0	There's the Big Bang model, which is a general idea that at some point early on, 10 million years ago the universe was hot
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