You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. But you were. Then why are you wasting my time? I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. Maybe going back to Plato. The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. Where are the equations I can solve? More than one. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. Huge excitement because of this paper. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. I got books -- I liked reading. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. Social media, Instagram. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. We knew he's going pass." Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? Theorists never get this job. And part of it was because no one told me. We wrote a lot of papers together. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. His recent posting on the matter (at . They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. Reply Insider . More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. My teacher, who was a wonderful guy, thinks about it a second and goes, "Did you ever think about how really hard it is to teach people things?" In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. And I said, "But I did do that." Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. What was your thesis research on? I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. We'll have to see. Why don't people think that way? You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. 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? It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. The two advantages I can think of are, number one, at that time, it's a very specific time, late '80s, early '90s -- specific in the sense that both particle physics and astronomy were in a lull. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. We don't know what to do with this." I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. College Park, MD 20740 The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion", published in September 2022.[15]. But there were postdocs. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". Benefits of tenure. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. I've done it. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. You mean generally across the faculty. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. You should not let w be less than minus one." That would be great. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. We just knew we couldn't afford it. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. I've got work and it's going well. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. Playing the game, writing the papers that got highly cited, being in the mainstream, and doing things that everyone agreed were interesting, which I did to a certain extent but not all the way when I was in Chicago. We've already established that. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. I was ten years old. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. Cole. And it was great. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. I have a short attention span. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. They are clearly different in some sense. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? That's a tough thing to do. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. That's a very hard question. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. Mark Hoffman was his name. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. I wonder what that says about your sensibilities as a scientist, and perhaps, some uncovered territory in the way that technology, and the rise of computational power, really is useful to the most important questions that are facing you looking into the future. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. He offered 13 pieces of . For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. Thank you for inviting me on. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Why do people get denied tenure? Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? It was -- I don't know. 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. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. If you take a calculus class, you learned all these techniques, like the product rule, and what to do with polynomials. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. They reach very different audiences, and they have very different impacts. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. So, they said, "Here's what we'll do. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. They're a little bit less intimidated. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. I think so. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. 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. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. This is December 1997. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . That's a romance, that's not a reality. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. 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." I do firmly believe that. Later on, I wrote another paper that sort of got me my faculty jobs that pointed out that dark energy could have exactly the same effect. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. Young people. This is literally the words that I was told. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. There's always exceptions to that. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. I think both grandfathers worked for U.S. Steel. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. It was a big hit to. Well, or I just didn't care. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. Good. Everyone knew that was real. It was very small. I think it was like $800 million. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. I'm curious if your more recent interests in politics are directly a reflection of what we've seen in science and public policy with regard to the pandemic. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? 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. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. So, they keep things at a certain level. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . It's a messy thing. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. Euclid's laws work pretty well. 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? I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. They seem unnatural to us. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . It's not what I want to do. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. You get dangerous. I don't think it has anything to do with what's more important, or fundamental, or exciting, or better science, but there is a certain kind of discipline that you learn in learning physics, and a certain bag of tricks and intellectual guiding stars that you pick up that are very, very helpful. So, taste matters. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. 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.