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...
socialism approach
We approach closer and closer to socialism.
harms
You can have the most wonderful motives for what you do, but if what you do harms other people, you're fooling yourself.
law understanding want
We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.
firsts facts moments
Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.
matter speed hours
The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.
magic world
The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.
equations
God is not described in equations.
atheist self ideas
Just the idea that we, these little collections of atoms and molecules, are part of the world, but a part that can look at the rest of the world and figure it out in a self-referential way, is kind of breathtaking.
data understanding add
Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It's not well-defined, it's completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding.
thinking yesterday benjamin-button
The fact that you can remember yesterday but not tomorrow is because of entropy. The fact that you're always born young and then you grow older, and not the other way around like Benjamin Button - it's all because of entropy. So I think that entropy is underappreciated as something that has a crucial role in how we go through life.
simple reality understanding
We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description.
time past glasses
The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.