Will Carroll
Will Carroll
Will Carroll is a sportswriter specializing in the coverage of medical issues, including injuries and performance-enhancing drugs. Carroll's "Under the Knife" column appeared on Baseball Prospectus for eight years during his stint there as a senior writer, and he also contributed to the site's radio efforts as well as the Puck Prospectus spin-off site. He is the author of two books on sports-related medical topics. Carroll has no formal medical training...
movies walked
I don't go to horror movies. I walked out of 'The Exorcist,' man.
afraid fall fear jump keys pocket subway walk
My crazy fear is I'm always afraid my keys are going to fall down a subway grate when I walk over it. I'm afraid they're going to jump out of my pocket and fall down. Isn't that stupid?
aspects huge lots time trying
I'm trying to understand how time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it.
account bit cool everyday full given happened happens lives needs understanding
A full understanding of what happens in our everyday lives needs to take into account what happened at the Big Bang. And not only is that intrinsically interesting and just kind of cool to think about, but it's also a mystery that is not given much attention by working scientists; it's a little bit underappreciated.
larger science
I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.
call conditions embedded larger local similar
If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a multiverse, then there's other places in this larger structure that have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could be pretty similar to what we have here.
advice against bet explain figure god moon moved natural needed people power religious science smart thousand
I don't want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it's not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
arrow aspect egg fact future interested omelet particular past remember time turn
The particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg.
bang born causes connects directly entropy grow kitchens precede properties time trying understand
I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing.
hard-work use profit
One who works for his own profit is likely to work hard. One who works for the use of others, without profit to himself, is likely not to work any harder than he must.
eras virtue old-fashioned
In this era in which we live, the old-fashioned virtues grow increasingly unpopular.
egalitarianism america doubt
As the egalitarianism of Marxism is attractive to many, socialism could have attracted many followers in America, anyway. But there is no doubt that it could not possibly have affected us so widely and so deeply as it has, had it not been heavily financed.
independence looks today
Instead of being taught independence, energy, and enterprise, our youth today is taught to look for security.
running teaching ideas
In the long run, much public opinion is made in the universities; ideas generated there filter down through the teaching profession and the students into the general public.