Sean Carroll
speaker
26,951 appearances
50 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard yesterday
Sean Carroll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
So for all sorts of reasons, gravity waves are just much, much less useful than electromagnetic waves.
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Peter forty two says string theory says reality is fundamentally made of tiny strings.
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How do these strings connect to each other?
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Are they bunched up like spaghetti?
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Or do they sit neatly in a crystal lattice?
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Is there any truly empty space between them?
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So I'm gonna answer this question, I'm gonna address this question, I should say, because I can't answer it very well.
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And I'm kind of tempted to say because no one can answer it very well, but I I I say that with a hundred percent um awareness that maybe somebody can and I just don't know.
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So string theory is an interesting thing.
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Remember, it was not invented to be a theory of gravity.
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Right.
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It was not invented by people going like, How does space time work?
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They were actually just trying to understand features of strongly interacting particles, relationship between the masses and the spins of various strongly interacting particles.
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They said, well, maybe if the particle is modeled as like a little segment of string that is itself spinning, I can do this.
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And only later did they realize that in a completely consistent version of string theory, you had particles.
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You had strings that acted like gravitons, that acted like massless spin two particles that coupled to the energy and the momentum of other particles in the theory.
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So string theory predicts the existence of gravity, okay?
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But it predicts it in a weird way.
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And now you have to sort of string theory has advanced quite a bit since the 70s or 80s, where it was first talked about, but the initial formulations of string theory.
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Theory were strings propagating through spacetime.
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Showing 961–980 of 26,951 · page 49 of 1348
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