Sean Carroll explains why physics is both simple and impossible

"Physics seems complicated, until you realize why it works so well, says physicist Sean Carroll, revealing the basis of the field's greatest successes: Radical simplicity. Carroll takes us from Newton's clockwork universe to Laplace's demon, to Einstein's spacetime revolution, exploring the historical shockwaves each breakthrough caused. If you've wondered how stripping the world down to its simplest parts can reveal deeper truths, this is where that story begins."

"SEAN M. CARROLL: I like to say that physics is hard because physics is easy, by which I mean we actually think about physics as students. You know, we took classes, we read books. And it was hard because there's all this new stuff, all these ideas, all these equations that we don't come across in our everyday lives. But the reason those ideas are hard and those equations are there is because physicists have a technique that has been amazingly successful."

"I'm Sean Carroll. I'm a physicist and philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, host of the "Mindscape" podcast, and also author of a bunch of books, most recently "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series, including "Space, Time, and Motion" and "Quanta and Fields." You might imagine or remember when you were taking physics courses, there were frictionless surfaces, there were pendula that rocked back and forth perfectly. We're always idealizing. We're always imagining there are no complications and then we're putting them back in."

Physics achieves profound explanatory power by reducing complex phenomena to idealized, radically simple systems. Historical breakthroughs—from Newton's deterministic clockwork to Laplace's demon and Einstein's spacetime revolution—illustrate how simplification reveals deeper principles and generates major conceptual change. Physics pedagogy uses frictionless surfaces and perfect pendula as idealizations, then reintroduces complications to test and refine theories. The core technique isolates essential features, derives general laws, and applies them across diverse contexts. This strategy succeeds remarkably in physics but would typically fail in disciplines like psychology, biology, or political science where context-specific complexities dominate.

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