People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. George and Terry team-taught a course on early universe cosmology using the new book by Kolb and [Michael] Turner that had just come out, because Terry was Rocky Kolb's graduate student at Chicago. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. Should we let w be less than minus one?" I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. 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. He is not at all ashamed to tell you that and explains things sometimes in his talks about cosmology by reference to his idea about God's existence. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? It is January 4th, 2021. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. The unions were anathema. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. 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. I mean, I could do it. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. Well, one ramification of that is technological. But I don't know what started it. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. Everyone knew that was real. So, I think it can't be overemphasized the extent to which the hard detailed work of theoretical physics is done with pencil and paper, and equations, and pictures, little drawings and so forth, but the ideas come from hanging out with people. So, like I said, we were for a long time in observational astronomy trying to understand how much stuff there is in the universe, how much matter there is. So, they knew everything that I had done. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. You get different answers from different people. 1 Physics Ellipse So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . So, in that sense, technology just hasn't had a lot to say because we haven't been making a lot of discoveries, so we don't need to worry about that. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. I'm not sure how much time passed. How do you understand all of these things? So, here's another funny story. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. Onondaga County. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. Fast forward to 2011. You know when someone wants to ask a question. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. 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. "The University of Georgia has been . To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. ", "Making Sense Podcast #124 In Search of Reality", "Alan Wallace and Sean Carroll on The Nature of Reality", "Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll, and Laura Mersini-Hougton debate the Big Bang and Creation Myths", "Episode 28: Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe Sean Carroll", "Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books", Oral history interview transcript with Sean Carroll on 4 January 2021, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, Video introduction to Sean Carroll's lectures "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sean_M._Carroll&oldid=1141102312. 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. 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. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. There are numerical variables and character variables. 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? Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. That was always temporary. Okay. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. 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. 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. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. The thing that people are looking for, the experimental effort these days, and for very good reason, is aimed at things that we think are plausibly true. It would have been better for me. That would be great. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. 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 . w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. My response to him was, "No thanks." Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? David, my pleasure. Yeah, I think that's right. @seanmcarroll . But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. So, we made a bet. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. I was there. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. Oh, kinds of physics. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. 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. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. 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. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? But it doesn't hurt. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. I just want to say. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. Sean Carroll on Twitter So, again, I foolishly said yes. So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. By reputation only. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." That doesn't work. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. Maybe going back to Plato. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . What could I do? Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. They seem unnatural to us. That's how philosophy goes. 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. You nerded out entirely. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. 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. Part of my finally, at last, successful attempt to be more serious on the philosophical side of things, I'm writing a bunch of invited papers for philosophy-edited volumes. Hopefully it'll work out. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. 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." Two and a half years I've been doing it, and just like with the videos, my style and my presentation has been improving, I hope, over time. In many ways, it was a great book. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. Carroll, S.B. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. 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? Let's sit and think about this seriously." It's just really, really hard." But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? So, again, I'm going to -- Zoom, etc., podcasts are great. That's what I am. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. So, that was true in high school. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. Now, you might ask, who cares? Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. This happens quite often. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. The statement added, "This failure is especially . Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. But you're good at math. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. Just get to know people. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. Princeton University Press. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." I was ten years old. They have a certain way of doing things. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. Because you've been at it long enough now, what have been some of the most efficacious strategies that you've found to join those two difficulties? Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. So, you can think of throwing a ball up into the air, and it goes up, but it goes up ever more slowly, because the Earth's gravitational pull is pulling it down. I'll never be Joe Rogan or Marc Maron, or whatever. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. We're not developing a better smart phone. Social media, Instagram. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. 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. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. They are clearly different in some sense. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. You're just too old for that. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. 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. Absolutely. So, late 1997, Phil Lubin, who was an astronomy professor at Santa Barbara, organized a workshop at KITP on measuring cosmological parameters with the cosmic microwave background. Chicago is a little bit in between. 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. So, he founded that. This didn't shut up the theorists. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Okay. Institute for Theoretical Physics. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. So, I kind of talked with my friends. None of that at Chicago. Tenure denial, seven years later | Small Pond Science You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. Being surrounded by the best people was really, really important to me. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . The original typescript is available. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. He offered 13 pieces of . He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. At Los Alamos, yes. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. Why did you do that?" In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. So, let's get off the tenure thing. Huge excitement because of this paper. Sean Carroll on free will. 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? I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. Some people love it. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? So, I was behind already. People know who you are. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? But he didn't know me in high school. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. 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. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities.
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