The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. You know when someone wants to ask a question. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Completely blindsided. These were all live possibilities. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. There's no delay on the line. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. Sean Carroll Height. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. 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. David, my pleasure. But the idea that there's any connection with what we do as professional scientists and these bigger questions about the nature of reality is just not one that modern physicists have. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. 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. So, I kind of talked with my friends. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. I had the best thesis committee ever. I know the field theory. I started blogging in 2004, and I was rejected in 2005 from Chicago. Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? So, there's three quarters in an academic year. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? 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. 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. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. That's a different me. This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. 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. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? There are evil people out there. Not a 100% expectation. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. That was my talk. I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? Did you do that self-consciously? So, again, I sort of brushed it off. 1 Physics Ellipse Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. 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, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. So far so good. 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 was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. We hit it off immediately. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. Absolutely. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They're like, what is a theory? So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. I'm enough of a particle physicist. 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. I'm not discounting me. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. Maybe going back to Plato. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. 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. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? Again, in my philosophy of pluralism, there should be both kinds. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. 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. 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. Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. Graduate school is a different thing. [14] He has also published a YouTube video series entitled "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" which provides physics instruction at a popular-science level but with equations and a mathematical basis, rather than mere analogy. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. I pretend that they're separate. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. 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. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. 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. What was your thesis research on? So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. Like, several of them. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . And I didn't. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. 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. I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. It's not a good or a bad kind. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. 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. And in the meantime, Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and others, came up with this idea of phantom energy, which had w less than minus one. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." Some people love it. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. All of which is to say, once I got to Caltech, I did start working in broadening myself, but it was slow, and it wasn't my job. When I went to MIT, it was even worse. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. But I did learn something. And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. I was ten years old. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. Benefits of tenure. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. We used Wald, and it was tough. So, I went to a large public school. Part of it is what I alluded to earlier. I really wanted to move that forward. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. That doesn't work. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. That includes me. You know, students are very different. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. So, that was one big thing. So, all of those things. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. Having said that, they're still really annoying. Someone like me, for example, who is very much a physicist, but also is interested in philosophy, and I would like to be more active even than I am at philosophy at the official level, writing papers and things like that. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. This is probably 2000. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. 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. What are we going to do? In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . 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. He explains the factors that led to his undergraduate education at Villanova, and his graduate work at Harvard, where he specialized in astronomy under the direction of George Field. Did you get any question like that? I'm an atheist. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. These are all very, very hard questions. I'm on a contract. ", "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. 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? I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. I think people like me should have an easier time. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. I'm not going to really worry about it. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. It's not what I want to do. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. I think it's bad in the following way. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure.
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