15th Annual Biard Lecture - Sean Carroll "Complexity in the Universe"

15th Annual R. Jack and Forest Lynn Biard Cosmology and Astrophysics Lecture

Complexity in the Universe

Sean Carroll (Johns Hopkins University and Santa Fe Institute)

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Held at the Mershon Auditorium, The Ohio State University

A famous law of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, states that the entropy of the universe increases over time. And entropy is supposed to be a measure of disorder or randomness. This raises an important question: how did we come to be? Biological organisms are exquisitely ordered and complex, not something we might expect to arise out of a universal tendency toward disorder. In this talk, I will show how simplicity/complexity is a distinct idea from order/disorder, and suggest how complexity can naturally develop between the Big Bang and today, before eventually fading away in the far future.

Sean Carroll () is the Homewood Professor 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, Vol. 2Quanta and Fields. He 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 Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the host of the weekly Mindscape podcast.

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