Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/12/23/holiday-message-hits-and-misses/ It's the end of the year, and time for our annual holiday break here at Mindscape. But as usual, we wrap up with a Holiday Message. This year, inspired by Joni Mitchell's "Hits" and "Misses" albums, I go through my scientific papers and talk about some of my favorites -- some of which were hits, in terms of making an impact on subsequent research, and some of which were misses by that standard. But I love them all! It's an excuse to talk about process -- how papers come to be, from the initial informal idea to sitting down and doing the work. Here are the papers I discuss in the episode. S.M. Carroll, G.B. Field and R. Jackiw, 1990, "Limits on A Lorentz and Parity-Violating Modification of Electrodynamics,'' Phys. Rev. D 41, 1231. S.M. Carroll, E. Farhi and A.H. Guth, 1992, "An Obstacle to Building a Time Machine,'' Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 263; Erratum: 68, 3368. S.M. Carroll, E. Farhi, A.H. Guth and K.D. Olum, 1994, "Energy-Momentum Restrictions on the Creation of Gott Time Machines,'' Phys. Rev. D 50, 6190; gr-qc/9404065. S.M. Carroll, 1998, "Quintessence and the Rest of the World,'' Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 3067; astro-ph/9806099. S.M. Carroll, V. Duvvuri, M. Trodden, and M.S. Turner, 2003, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due to New Gravitational Physics?'' astro-ph/0306438. S.M. Carroll and J. Chen, 2004, "Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time'', hep-th/0410270. L. Ackerman, M.R. Buckley, S.M. Carroll, and M. Kamionkowski, 2008, "Dark Matter and Dark Radiation," arxiv:0807.5126. S.M. Carroll, M.C. Johnson, and L. Randall, 2009, "Dynamical Compactification," arxiv:0904.3115. C. Cao, S.M. Carroll, and S. Michalakis, 2016, "Space from Hilbert Space: Recovering Geometry from Bulk Entanglement," arxiv:1606.08444. C. Cao and S.M. Carroll, 2018, "Bulk Entanglement Gravity without a Boundary: Towards Finding Einstein's Equation in Hilbert Space," arxiv:1712.02803. N. Bao, S.M. Carroll, A. Chatwin-Davies, J. Pollack, and G. Remmen, 2017, “Branches of the Black Hole Wave Function Need Not Contain Firewalls," arxiv:1712.04955. Mindscape Podcast playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxY_fRExpDXr87tzRbPCaA5x Sean Carroll channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/seancarroll #podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture