The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. Oh, kinds of physics. Not necessarily because they were all bookish. If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. It would be bad. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. And he said, "Yes, sure." Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. Tell us a bit about your new book . +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. And that got some attention also. And I knew that. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. So, that's one important implication. Now, can I promise you that the benefit is worth the cost, and I wouldn't actually be better off just sitting down and spending all of my time thinking about that one thing? I'm not sure how much time passed. They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. Where are the equations I can solve? I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. We don't care what you do with it." So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? So, I think it's a big difference. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. And who knows, it all worked out okay, but this sort of background, floating, invisible knowledge is really, really important, and was never there for me. But you were. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. I've never cared. I had it. Perhaps, to get back to an earlier comment about some of the things that are problematic about academic faculty positions, as you say, yes, sometimes there is a positive benefit to trends, but on the other hand, when you're establishing yourself for an academic career, that's a career that if all goes well will last for many, many decades where trends come and go. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. Like, that's a huge thing. Another paper, another paper, another paper. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. You really have to make a case. His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. Where was string theory, and how much was it on your radar when you were thinking about graduate school and the kinds of things you might pursue for thesis research? What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. We'll measure it." You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. Huge excitement because of this paper. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. I don't agree with what they do. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. So, the technology is always there. [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, 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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. And that's the only thing you do. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. A video of the debate can be seen here. Absolutely. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." Absolutely brilliant course. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. I think we only collaborated on two papers. But most of us didn't think it was real. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. They were all graduate students at the time. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. They just don't care. So, I realized right from the start, I would not be able to do it at all if I assume that the audience didn't understand anything about equations, if I was not allowed to use equations. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". The statement added, "This failure is especially . His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. But you're good at math. More than one. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. Should we let w be less than minus one?" I really wanted to move that forward. I think, now, as wonderful as Villanova was, and I can rhapsodize about what a great experience I had there, but it's nothing like going to a major, top notch university, again, just because of the other students who are around you. What's so great about right now? Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. Carroll, S.B. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. And guess what? A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. You know the answer to that." These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. People still do it. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. But research professor is a faculty member. Cole. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. Is it the perfect situation? Six months is a very short period of time. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. No, no. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. I was less good of a fit there. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. The book talks about wide range of topics such as submicroscopic components of the universe, whether human existence can have meaning without Godand everything between the two. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. And we started talking, and it was great. There was no internet back then. Then, you enter graduate school as more or less a fully formed person, and you learn to do science. That's how philosophy goes. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." We made up lecture notes, and it was great. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. You know, students are very different. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. What should we do? You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. I didn't do what I wanted to do. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. You were starting to do that. Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. I was ten years old. Well, that's interesting. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. We've already established that. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. I'm not making this up. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. In fact, no one cited it at the time -- people are catching on now -- but it was on the arrow of time in cosmology and why entropy in the universe is smaller in the past than in the future. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. I did various things. I think that's the right way to put it. When I told Ed Guinan, my undergraduate advisor, that I had George Field as an advisor, he said, "Oh, you got lucky." His most-cited work, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due To New Gravitational Physics?" To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? Advertising on podcasts is really effective compared to TV or radio or webpages. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. Go longer. Again, I was wrong over and over again. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. There are numerical variables and character variables. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" That's why I said, "To first approximation." But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. It was a big hit to. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. ", "Is God a good theory? I lucked into it, once again. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. Well, sorry, also one string theorist: Barton Zwiebach was there. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? . I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? He was doing intellectual work in the process of public outreach, which is really, really hard, and he was just a master at it as well as being an extremely accomplished planetary scientist, and working with NASA and so forth. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. You know when someone wants to ask a question. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories.