Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. And I love it when they're interested in outreach or activism or whatever, but I say, "Look, if you want to do that as a professional physicist, you've got to prioritize getting a job as a professional physicist." Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. Field. The statement added, "This failure is especially . Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? [32][33][34] Some of his work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity and the arrow of time. 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. Go longer. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. I did everything right. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. All while I was in Santa Barbara. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. Sean Carroll Height. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. 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. I did various things. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. It's still pretty young. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. You really have to make a case. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. 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. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? I'm not sure how much time passed. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. 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. So, like I said, I really love topology. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? We used Wald, and it was tough. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. I'm an atheist. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. I love it. 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. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" 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. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Let every student carve out a path of study. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Three, tell people about it. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. The unions were anathema. So, that's what he would do. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. Carroll, S.B. Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. I love people who are just so passionate about their little specialty. Powerful people from all over the place go there. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. I got books -- I liked reading. I'm enough of a particle physicist. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. Maybe it's them. 1 Physics Ellipse So, I was on the ground floor in terms of what the observational people. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. It is remarkable. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. The discussion with Stuart Bartlett was no exception. 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? Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." Let's start with the research first. It was not a very strict Catholic school. That just didn't happen. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. But maybe it could. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. Part of it is what I alluded to earlier. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? Everyone knew that was real. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. So, I was behind already. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. You know, I wish I knew. You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. Then you've come to the right place. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. I can do it, and it is fun. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. So, that appeared in my book as a vignette. So, I said, "Yes, I proposed a book and your wife rejected it.". I get that all the time. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. Also, they were all really busy and tired. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. We had problem sets that we graded. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. That one and a follow up to that. You're just too old for that. 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. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. I like her a lot. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. Yeah, no, good. Well, most people got tenure. I was a theorist. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. I was ten years old. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. David, my pleasure. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. So, that was a benefit. The polarization of light from the CMB might be rotated just a little bit as it travels through space. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." They are . There's always exceptions to that. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. I was less good of a fit there. It's all worth it in the end. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. In retrospect, there's two big things. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. As I look from a galaxy to a cluster to large-scale structure, it goes up, and it goes up to .3, and it kind of stays at .3, even as I look at larger and larger things. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. ", "Is God a good theory? Based on my experience as an Instructor at a major research university and now tenure-track faculty at a major public university, I would say that all of his major points are . Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? I will confess the error of my ways. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. 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? Martin White. I think I did not really feel that, honestly. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. 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. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. Get on with your life. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. 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? Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. 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." The original typescript is available. But within the course of a week -- coincidence problem -- Vikram Duvvuri, who was a graduate student in Chicago, knocked on my door, and said, "Has anyone ever thought of taking R and adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity and seeing what would happen?" So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. So, they keep things at a certain level. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. 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. Some people are just crackpots. 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. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. We're kind of out of that. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. 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 almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. 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. So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. So, taste matters. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. You're not going to get tenure.
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