As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this?

And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large scale universe.

It's not one of the first things people would say, if you asked a modern cosmologist, What are the problems we're trying to address?

I wrote my book, Our Final Century, as a scientist, just a general scientist. But there's one respect, I think, in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective, and that's that it offers an awareness of the immense future.

At TEDxCaltech, cosmologist Sean Carroll attacks in an entertaining and thought provoking tour through the nature of time and the universe a deceptively simple question Why does time exist at all? The potential answers point to a surprising view of the nature of the universe, and our place in it.

Why should it be considered witty to celebrate the uselessness of knowledge? I witnessed a similar attitude from a cosmologist when I participated in a radio show a few years ago the host remarked to him that his research has virtually no practical applicability, to which he quickly replied, I m proud of that, yes.