Sean M. Carroll

Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He was formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) department of physics. He also is currently an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and he has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, where he has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist. He is known for his atheism, his vocal critique of theism and defense of naturalism. He is considered a prolific public speaker and science popularizer. In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation.

He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS), and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, Time in physics and the Higgs boson. He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics.

In 2018, Carroll began a podcast called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. He has also published a YouTube video series entitled "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" which provides physics instruction at a popular-science level but with equations and a mathematical basis, rather than mere analogy. The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, published in September 2022 and the second volume, Quanta and Fields, published in May 2024, with the third and final volume pending publication.

Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. Field. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. From 2006 until 2022, he was a Research Professor of Physics at California Institute of Technology. In 2022, he was named the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Carroll has a B.S. in astronomy, Astrophysics and Philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". In 2014, he was awarded the Andrew Gemant Award by the American Institute of Physics for "significant contributions to the cultural, artistic or humanistic dimension of physics". In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is also a very prolific public speaker, hosting the podcast series Mindscape, which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics.

Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. He also worked as a consultant in several movies like Avengers: Endgame and Thor: The Dark World. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo.