But research professor is a faculty member. but academe is treacherous. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. What's so great about right now? So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . I pretend that they're separate. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. It's at least possible. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. 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? But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. He had to learn it. Would that be on that level? 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. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. There was, but it was kind of splintered because of this large number of people. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. It's not a good or a bad kind. Would I be interested in working on it with him? More than just valid. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. [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. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . You nerded out entirely. But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? [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. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. It sounded very believable. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. We're not developing a better smart phone. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. Some of them might be. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. 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. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. The polarization of light from the CMB might be rotated just a little bit as it travels through space. The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. It's still pretty young. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. There are evil people out there. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. 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? I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. I did various things. 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. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. I think, they're businesspeople. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. That's absolutely true. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. 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. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. Sean Carroll. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. . If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. I think it was like $800 million. Now, can I promise you that the benefit is worth the cost, and I wouldn't actually be better off just sitting down and spending all of my time thinking about that one thing? So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. You've been around the block a few times. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. They're a little bit less intimidated. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. I love writing books so much. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? Phew, this is a tough position to be in. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. It was July 4th. Oh, kinds of physics. They need it written within six months so it can be published before the discovery is announced. It just came out of the blue. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. It's not just trendiness. 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. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. 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. Well, that's not an experimental discovery. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. No one told me. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. 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. 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. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. The unions were anathema. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". Where was string theory, and how much was it on your radar when you were thinking about graduate school and the kinds of things you might pursue for thesis research? I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. And you mean not just in physics. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. 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. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. It would have been better for me. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? It's not just a platitude. She said, "John is right, and I was also right. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. That's my question. And he said, "Absolutely. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. Move on with it. I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. Then you've come to the right place. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . That was great, a great experience. I think it's gone by now. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. Carroll, S.B. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. Was that the game plan from day one for you? In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. There's an equation you can point to. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. Ten of those men and no women were successful. So, the technology is always there. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. Social media, Instagram. And it's not just me. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. My teacher, who was a wonderful guy, thinks about it a second and goes, "Did you ever think about how really hard it is to teach people things?" I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." The Hubble constant is famously related to the dark energy, because it's the current value of the Hubble constant where dark energy is just taking over. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. So, I said, well, how do you do that? It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. 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. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. This didn't shut up the theorists. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. 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. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. So, they keep things at a certain level. You know the answer to that." But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. I get that all the time. I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. And they said, "Sure!" Should we let w be less than minus one?" But you were. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. I did always have an interest in -- I don't want to use the word outreach because that sort of has formal connotations, but in reaching out. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. People still do it. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. I made that choice consciously. We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." But I'm classified as a physicist. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit.