Finding Yourself in a Large Universe with Professor Sean Carroll, Johns Hopkins University and Santa Fe Institute

Reception & refreshments at 4:30 pm in Kendade Hall Atrium
Lecture begins at 5 pm in Cleveland L2

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Physics & Astronomy, the Department of Neuroscience & Behavior, the Charlotte Haywood Lecture Fund, and the Office of the Provost.

Modern physics frequently envisions scenarios in which the universe is very large indeed: large enough that any allowed local situation or observer is likely to exist more than once, perhaps an infinite number of times. Multiple copies of you might exist elsewhere in space, in time, or on other branches of the wave function. Professor Carroll will argue for a unified strategy for dealing with self-locating uncertainty that recovers the Born Rule of quantum mechanics in ordinary situations, and suggests a cosmological measure in a multiverse. The approach is fundamentally Bayesian, treating probability talk as arising from credences in conditions of uncertainty. Such an approach doesn't work in cosmologies dominated by random fluctuations (Boltzmann Brains), so he will argue in favor of excluding such models on the basis of cognitive instability.

Sean Carroll is Homewood Prof. of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on the foundations of physics, including issues in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, and emergence. He is the author of several books, most recently The Biggest Ideas in the Universe series. Professor Carroll has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of London, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science. He's the host of the weekly Mindscape podcast.