And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. There's still fundamental questions. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. We're not developing a better smart phone. Let's sit and think about this seriously." Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. More than just valid. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. 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. What could I do? [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. So, a lot of the reasons why my path has been sort of zig-zaggy and back and forth is because -- I guess, the two reasons are: number one, I didn't have great sources of advice, and number two, I wasn't very good at taking the advice when I got it. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. 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. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. And we started talking, and it was great. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. I like her a lot. They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. You've been around the block a few times. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? I don't interact with it that strongly personally. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. That was great, a great experience. Also, assistant professor, right? Powerful people from all over the place go there. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. It doesn't always work. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. Yeah. I started blogging in 2004, and I was rejected in 2005 from Chicago. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. 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. So, that's how I started working with Alan. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. I think so. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? It sounded very believable. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. That's not data. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. 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. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. 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. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. We hit it off immediately. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. 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. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. The obvious choices were -- the theoretical cosmology effort was mostly split between Fermilab and the astronomy department at Chicago, less so in the physics department. I was less good of a fit there. But it was kind of overwhelming. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. The original typescript is available. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. I did various things. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. Sorry about that. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. We certainly never worked together. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. 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. That's a recognized thing that's going on. Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. Six months is a very short period of time. She's very, very good. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? 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. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. What can I write down? There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. 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. This is the advice I tell my students. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. We just knew we couldn't afford it. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. So, I want to do something else. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. Martin White. And I wasn't working on either one of those. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. 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 think it's a big difference. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. At the time, . I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. You mean generally across the faculty. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. I don't want to say anything against them. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. Let's put it that way. I know the field theory. I really wanted to move that forward. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. I think people like me should have an easier time. So far so good. 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? It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? We'll figure it out. At Los Alamos, yes. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. It's not what I want to do. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. She could pinpoint it there. Then, you enter graduate school as more or less a fully formed person, and you learn to do science. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. 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. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. Good. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. Let's go back to the happier place of science. 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. 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? He used that to offer me a job, to pay my salary. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. What was your thought process along those lines? 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? I said, "Yeah, don't worry. 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. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. That's right. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. So, I said, well, how do you do that? November 16, 2022 9:15 am. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. I decided to turn them down, mostly because I thought I could do better. What you would guess is the universe is expanding, and how fast it's expanding is related to that amount of density of the universe in a very particular way. 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. Part of my finally, at last, successful attempt to be more serious on the philosophical side of things, I'm writing a bunch of invited papers for philosophy-edited volumes. Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. Measure all the matter in the universe. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. 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. 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 . Get on with your life. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. So, George was randomly assigned to me. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. They just don't care. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. Oh, there aren't any? I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. Sean Carroll. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . But I don't know what started it. ", "2014 National Convention Los Angeles Freedom From Religion Foundation", "Responding to Sean Carroll: What If There Had Been a Camera at the Resurrection? Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . January 2, 2023 11:30 am. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. They have a certain way of doing things. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. So, I'm really quite excited about this. They're a little bit less intimidated. I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. 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. [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. No, not really. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. The rest of the field needs to care. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? 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. You can be surprised. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. We don't know what to do with this." Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. I didn't do what I wanted to do. So, every person who came, [every] graduate student, was assigned an advisor, a faculty member, to just sort of guide them through their early years. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. I wonder, Sean, if there's the germinating idea that would inform your interests in outreach, and in doing public science and things like that, it was that inclination that was bounded in an academic context, that you would take eventually into the world of YouTube, and hundreds of thousands of lay people out there, who are learning quantum gravity as a result of you. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. They basically admitted that. Would I be interested in working on it with him? So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. @seanmcarroll . So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. Yeah, so actually, I should back up a little bit, because like I said, at Harvard, there were no string theorists.
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