Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . In a sense, I hope not. 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. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. Having said that, they're still really annoying. It's my personal choice. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. 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. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. He was a blessing, helping me out. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. So, two things. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. Sean Carroll on Twitter 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. They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. 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. But, you know, the contingencies of history. 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. Remember, I applied there to go to undergraduate school there. Alright, Sean. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. Sean Carroll - Chief Procurement Officer - NYS Office of General Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. We knew he's going pass." I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. So, I kind of talked with my friends. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. Like, crazily successful. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. Completely blindsided. 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. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. That's not by itself bad. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. These are all very, very hard questions. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. So, I recognize that. And it was great. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? I didn't really want to live there. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. And that's the only thing you do. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. Is there something wrong about it?" So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. What was your thesis research on? He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. More than one. Stephen Morrow is his name. It's still pretty young. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. But I'm classified as a physicist. In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. You have the equation. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. In fact, no one cited it at the time -- people are catching on now -- but it was on the arrow of time in cosmology and why entropy in the universe is smaller in the past than in the future. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. 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 much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. 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. Get on with your life. I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. That's it. I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? I think to first approximation, no. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." It was fine. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. They do not teach either. What's so great about right now? So, again, I'm going to -- Zoom, etc., podcasts are great. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is That's one of the things that I wanted to do. I think, to some extent, yes. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. And guess what? Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. Who knows? I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. And you mean not just in physics. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. Would I be interested in working on it with him? On the point of not having quantum field theory as an undergraduate, I wonder, among your cohort, if you felt that you stuck out, like a more working class kid who went to Villanova, and that was very much not the profile of your fellow graduate students. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. 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?" I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? It is incredibly draining for me to do it. And that's not bad or cynical. This is something that's respectable.". Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. 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. Sean Carroll's new book argues quantum physics leads to many worlds You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. [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. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? "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 . I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. It's just like being a professor. My mom was tickled. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. It was a tough decision, but I made it. No one does that. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. 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. That was always true. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. 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.
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