Sean Carroll to Receive 2025 Klopsteg Award

The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) announced that Sean Carroll, physicist, teacher, and writer, is the 2025 recipient of the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award. The lecture and award will be presented during the AAPT Summer Meeting.

This award recognizes educators who have made notable and creative contributions to the teaching of physics. Carroll is recognized specifically “For his significant efforts sharing the excitement and promise of modern physics with a broad audience, his work in conveying intricate aspects of contemporary physics clearly and thoroughly without cutting corners or oversimplifying, and for his innovative efforts in science outreach spanning almost two decades, Dr. Sean M. Carroll is hereby named as the recipient of the 2025 Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award.”

Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD and a Fractal Faculty at Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, Carroll is a renowned and successful theoretical physicist with expertise in the areas of cosmology, quantum gravity, and general relativity that are at the heart of our understanding of the universe. Throughout his career, he has made outstanding efforts to communicate contemporary physics to the public in broad and diverse ways. His ability to express the excitement of physics with clarity and enthusiasm makes him an excellent candidate for this award. 

He is the author of six highly successful popular science books (translated into over 20 languages): From Eternity to Here; The Particle at the End of the Universe; The Big Picture, Something Deeply Hidden, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion and Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, Vol. 2. Each has been enthusiastically received, with Particle winning the Royal Society’s Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013, and The Big Picture, Something Deeply Hidden, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, and Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, Vol. 2 all reaching the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list immediately upon their release.

Carroll has also written for a variety of popular publications, including The New York Times, Discover, New Scientist, Scientific American, Physics Today, Sky & Telescope, and The Wall Street Journal.

A pioneer in using the internet for outreach, he began his blog, Preposterous Universe in 2004, making it one of the first blogs by a professional physicist that frequently hosts interesting scientific discussions. He is an energetic organizer of public events, co-founding Los Angeles’s Science Soirée, while video recordings of his workshop Moving Naturalism Forward have become a popular online resource.

Carroll continues to explore new venues for science communication and public engagement. His podcast, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape, began in 2018 and has over 340 episodes which regularly attract over 100,000 listeners per podcast. In addition to interviewing physicists (from post-docs to Nobel Laureates), he has invited a broad range of scientists and thinkers, including neuroscientists, economists, and philosophers, demonstrating that, rather than being a separate aspect, science is an integral part of our broader culture.

He has developed a new series of videos titled The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, with many of the videos being viewed over 200,000 times. Here again, Carroll goes deeper into topics than most other popularizers, discussing for example, in an open and accessible manner, how fields turn into particles (such as the Higgs field becoming the Higgs boson) when they are quantized.

He is a frequent public lecturer, at venues from Science in the Pub events to the World Science Festival and the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology. His TEDx talk has received over a million and a half views online. His recorded lectures for The Great Courses have received excellent reviews. He was a featured speaker at the March for Science event in April 2017 in Los Angeles, CA.

Carroll has endeavored to grow the audience, appearing frequently on radio and TV, promoting and explaining science on shows such as The Colbert Report, History Channel’s The Universe, Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole, PBS’s NewsHour, and public radio’s Science Friday. He has successfully collaborated with the producers of film and television, through the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange program. As a volunteer science consultant, he has contributed to the movies TRON: Legacy, Thor, Angels & Demons, Big Hero Six, and Avengers: Endgame as well as the TV shows Bones, Fringe, and The Big Bang Theory.

Carroll has simultaneously remained very active in research throughout his career. He has made significant contributions to theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity, and has published work on the foundations of quantum mechanics.

About the Award

Named for Paul E. Klopsteg, a principal founder, a former AAPT President, and a long-time member of AAPT, the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award recognizes outstanding communication of the excitement of contemporary physics to the general public. The recipient delivers the Klopsteg Lecture at an AAPT Summer Meeting on a topic of current significance and at a level suitable for a non-specialist audience and receives a monetary award, an Award Certificate, and travel expenses to the meeting.

Previous Awardees

About AAPT
AAPT is an international organization for physics educators, physicists, and industrial scientists—with members worldwide. Dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of physics through teaching, AAPT provides awards, publications, and programs that encourage teaching practical application of physics principles, support continuing professional development, and reward excellence in physics education. AAPT was founded in 1930 and is headquartered in the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland.

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