My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. Abdoulaye Doucoure came close to leaving Everton under Frank Lampard I was a theorist. What sparked that interest in you? There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. There's no other input that you have. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. 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. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. So, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. 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. So, that's what he would do. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. 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? What are we going to do? This happens quite often. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. I did not succeed in that goal. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. 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. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. 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? When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. Another bad planning on my part. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. 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. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist | Heritage Project It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. Well, most people got tenure. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. There are so many, and it's very easy for me to admit that I suffer from confirmation biases, but it's very hard for me to tell you which ones they are, because we all each individually think that we are perfectly well-calibrating ourselves against our biases, otherwise we would change them in some way. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. Huge excitement because of this paper. At Los Alamos, yes. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" There's a bunch. But other people have various ways of getting to the . I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. The tuition was right. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. Then why are you wasting my time? In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. That doesn't work. No, quite the opposite. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. I took almost all the physics classes. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. Oh, yeah, entirely. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. It's funny when that happens. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road That was always true. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. They're not exactly the same activity, but they're part of the same landscape. Young universities ditch the tenure system. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. "What major research universities care about is research. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. As much as I love those people, I should have gone somewhere else and really shocked my system a little bit. So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? No, I cannot in good conscience do that. So many ideas I want to get on paper. What was he working on when you first met him? So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. . I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. But, you know, my standard is what is it that excites me at the moment? Sean M. Carroll - Wikipedia So, I was done in 20 minutes. But I don't know what started it. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. He invited a few of us. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. Not so they could do it. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. 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. What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. I'll be back. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. Part of it is what I alluded to earlier. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. No, not really. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. 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.". Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. Then, you enter graduate school as more or less a fully formed person, and you learn to do science. 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. That's the case I tried to make. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? [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. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. [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. Yes, well that's true. These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. I think there are plenty of physicists. So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. But this is a huge metaphysical assumption that underlies this debate and divides us. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. 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. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? Let's go back to the happier place of science. I mean, I could do it. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. In a sense, I hope not. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? 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? It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. Well, sorry, also one string theorist: Barton Zwiebach was there. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. I just drifted away very, very gradually. Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? This could be great. I really wanted to move that forward. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. 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 think people like me should have an easier time. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. It is remarkable. I think, to some extent, yes. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. 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. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. Chicago is a little bit in between. Yeah, so actually, I should back up a little bit, because like I said, at Harvard, there were no string theorists. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University Russell Wilson denies he wanted Pete Carroll and John Schneider fired Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? Be prolific and reliable. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. 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. 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. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. I had never heard of him before. He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. These were all live possibilities. 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. Absolutely the same person.". The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. Nikole Hannah-Jones Denied Tenure at University of North Carolina But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. Why Sean Carroll is wrong - Quantum Moxie -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. Author admin Reading 4 min Views 5 Published by 2022. Also, assistant professor, right? 4. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. I'm not sure. 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. What are the Different Reasons for Being Denied Tenure? Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. Let's just take the risk, and if they don't work out they won't get tenure." The tenure decision is very different than the hiring decision. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. 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. Should we let w be less than minus one?" Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. Carroll has a B.S. At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. Having said that, they're still really annoying. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that.