Hello everyone and welcome to Talk Nurti. I'm your host Kara Santa Maria and my guest tonight is Sean Carroll. Sean's a theoretical physicist at Caltech who's

written two popular science books

from eternity to here the quest for the ultimate theory of time and more recently

the particle at the end of the universe how the hunt for the Higgs boson leads us to the edge of a new world.

Sean's blog is called Preposterous Universe and he's contributed to it regularly since 2004. Now you may notice that part way through this

episode Sean alludes to a major announcement that was made this past Monday

March 17, 2014.

Although in the episode, he says,

this coming Monday.

And that's not because we spent the hour time traveling.

I wish that were the case,

but it's actually because we recorded this podcast a little

over a week ago. In fact the announcement that he refers to has major

implications for understanding our universe. If the results of the Bicep II experiment that he references actually do hold up,

scientists may be glimpsing back at the earliest moments of our universe yet.

I mean, we're talking a fraction of a second after the Big Bang and

this discovery could confirm the inflationary theory that Sean and I talk about later in

the episode. Now if you want to learn more about this

this amazing discovery, just Google Bicep 2, gravitational waves or even

inflation and check out the news surrounding those search terms.

Or you could just go to preposterous universe.com.

Sean explains this stuff, a hell of a lot better than most.

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