I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. They were very bad at first. But there's an enormous influence put on your view of reality by all of these pre-existing propositions that you think are probably true. 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. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. So, that was true in high school. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? Now, the KITP. Not a 100% expectation. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. People didn't take him seriously. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. Tell us a bit about your new book . But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. You know, students are very different. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. Well, that's not an experimental discovery. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. 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. It was hard to figure out what the options were. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. Why did you do that?" First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. It was a huge success. They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. I think to first approximation, no. Dutton, $29. Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. 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. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. 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. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. Who was on your thesis committee? Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. Sean Carroll on free will. 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. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. That was my talk. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. Or other things. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . 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. What are the odds? You know the answer to that." You know, I wish I knew. It's funny that you mention law school. That includes me. It had gotten a little stuck. There were two that were especially good. 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 played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. 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. I'm not discounting me. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. They're like, what is a theory? I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. But it doesn't hurt. I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. The COBE satellite that was launched on a pretty shoestring budget at the time, and eventually found the CMB anisotropies, that was the second most complicated thing NASA had ever put in orbit after the Hubble space telescope. It's a junior faculty job. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? 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. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. A lot of people focus on the fact that he was so good at reaching out to broad audiences, in an almost unprecedented way, that they forget that he was really a profound thinker as well. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. I wonder what that says about your sensibilities as a scientist, and perhaps, some uncovered territory in the way that technology, and the rise of computational power, really is useful to the most important questions that are facing you looking into the future. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. 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. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. But they're really doing things that are physics. I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. Who did you work with? You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. 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. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. So, that was definitely an option. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. I've gotten good at it. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. You get dangerous. I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. There's a few, but it's a small number. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. Really, really great guy. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. 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. But, you know, my standard is what is it that excites me at the moment? I made that choice consciously. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. That's just not my thing. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. Then why are you wasting my time? And I knew that. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. They chew you up and spit you out. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. 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? 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. 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. But there were postdocs. I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. All of them had the same idea, that the amount of matter in the universe acts as a break on the expansion rate of the universe. Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. I will confess the error of my ways. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. 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. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. We don't know the theory of everything. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. 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. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. I didn't do what I wanted to do. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. He was a blessing, helping me out. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. 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. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? It sounded very believable. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. It's at least possible. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level.
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