Sean M. Carroll: life at the edge

Today Brett Levy reviews "Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge," an anthology of scientists and science fiction writers looking very far forward.

Among the contributors is Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who is among the bloggers at Cosmic Variance, an essential if occasionally mind-blowing Web stop. There you'll find him writing about physicist-y stuff, including excerpts of a paper on a long-range "fifth force": "A long-range fifth force coupled to dark matter can induce a coupling to ordinary matter if the dark matter interacts with Standard Model fields." But just when your brain starts to hurt, he'll post with exasperation about a billboard campaign that says, "Sex can wait" because "I want to be an engineer."  "That's why you should become scientists, kids!" he blogs. "(Because engineers don't have sex.  You want me to spell it out for you?)"

But back to the book. Levy notes that Freeman Dyson is the progenitor of many of the authors' ideas. In 2003, Dyson spoke at the TED conference; that video has just been made available online. And it's after the jump.

Dyson's a softspoken but amusing guy. In his talk on why we should look for life in the outer solar system, Dyson says, among other things, that planets are good places to find life: "Any creatures that live on a planet are pretty well stuck." Like us. For now.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Sir Mervs via Flickr