Another paper, another paper, another paper. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. We had problem sets that we graded. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" You know, there's a lot we don't understand. I think, both, actually. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? You really have to make a case. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. 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. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. 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. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. Then, the other big one was, again, I think the constant lesson as I'm saying all these words out loud is how bad my judgment has been about guiding my own academic career. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. It's my personal choice. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. Just get to know people. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. There's a lot of inertia. 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? Do you have any good plans for a book?" We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. Recent Books. I'd like to start first with your parents. No, not really. [53][third-party source needed]. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. 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. Suite 110 Sean Carroll: I'm not in a super firm position, cause I don't have tenure at Caltech, so, but I don't care either. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." Do you go to the economics department or the history department? When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? Well, that's interesting. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. 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. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. Maybe not. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. It was very small. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. He was a very senior guy. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. That's a huge effect on people's lives. 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. 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. Is this where you want to be long-term, or is it possible that an entirely new opportunity could come along that could compel you that maybe this is what you should pursue next? So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" I have a short attention span. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. That's not what I do for a living. 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. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. There are evil people out there. ", "Is God a good theory? From the outside looking in, you're on record saying that your natural environment for working in theoretical physics is a pen and a pad, and your career as a podcaster, your comfort zone in the digital medium, from the outside looking in, I've been thinking, is there somebody who was better positioned than you to weather the past ten months of social distancing, right? 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. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. And it was great. So, that would happen. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. What was your thesis research on? I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. That's all it is. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. I just don't want to do that anymore. None of that at Chicago. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. We might have met at a cosmology conference. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. 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. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. I'm not going to really worry about it. They're not in the job of making me feel good. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. It's just really, really hard." There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. That includes me. So, it was really just a great place. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. And he's like, "Sure." We could discover what the dark matter is. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. Absolutely brilliant course. What could I do? There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. 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. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. I was taking Fortran. 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. Well, sorry, also one string theorist: Barton Zwiebach was there. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Alright, Sean. I think people like me should have an easier time. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. He wrote wonderful popular books. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. Who was on your thesis committee? 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. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. In retrospect, there's two big things. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. These were people who were at my level. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. And you mean not just in physics. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" So, we wrote a paper. Here is my thought process. He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. So, again, I foolishly said yes. So, George was randomly assigned to me. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". That's right. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. 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. So, they keep things at a certain level. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. All while I was in Santa Barbara. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. 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. It's challenging. That's absolutely true. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. And now I know it. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. That doesn't work. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. I have no problems with that. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. 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. At the time, . We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? That's my question. What are the odds? I was in Sidney's office all the time. 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. [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. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. Huge excitement because of this paper. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. Not so they could do it. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. Okay? Maybe it's them. That's what I am. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. 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. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. This happens quite often. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited.