KINGSTON, R.I. – Feb. 24, 2025 – Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist, philosopher, science advocate and author who’s been called the “world’s greatest living science explainer,” will deliver the annual University of Rhode Island Cruickshank Lecture on Tuesday, March 4, as a part of a three-day visit to URI.

Carroll, the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and an external faculty member at the Sante Fe Institute, will discuss “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe” at 7 p.m. in the Richard E. Beaupre Center for Chemical and Forensic Sciences, 140 Flagg Road, Kingston. A reception and book signing starts at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Carroll is the author of popular-level and textbook-level books, including the series “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion” (2022) and “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Quanta and Fields” (2024), which offer accessible accounts of modern physics that are backed by expert knowledge.

“We’re excited to have such a brilliant thinker with such a wide range of interests visit URI,” said Leonard Kahn, chair of the Department of Physics who organized the event. “Sean Carroll is a prolific author and speaker. His lecture will be accessible for the entire community and will give his perspective about how the laws of nature came to be.”

Formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Carroll’s research focuses on some of the most foundational questions about quantum mechanics, space-time cosmology, and complexity. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by such groups as the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London, among others.

A science consultant for film and television, he has appeared on such shows as “The Colbert Report,” PBS’s “NOVA,” and “Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.” He is also the author of “From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time,” “The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World,” and “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself,” and is host of the popular weekly interview podcast “Mindscape.”

During his visit to URI March 3-5, Carroll will meet physics faculty and students, along with faculty from STEM and humanities disciplines. He will also deliver a physics seminar on March 3 in Bliss Hall Room 190 at 4:30 p.m. On March 5, he will meet with the U2GRC group, a collaboration between URI and the University of Massachusetts focused on gravitational wave research.

The Alexander M. Cruickshank Endowed Lectureship was established in 1999. It is named for Alexander M. Cruickshank, who served on the URI chemistry faculty for 30 years and was subsequently the director of the Gordon Research Conferences until his retirement in 1993. The lecture series is sponsored by the URI Department of Physics, the Gordon Research Center and URI’s College of Arts and Sciences.

For more information, contact Leonard Kahn at lenkahn@uri.edu.