[21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. I remember that. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. I was a good teacher. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff. You should not let w be less than minus one." You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. We've already established that. Certainly, no one academic in my family. That's right. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. MIT was a weird place in various ways. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. I had the best thesis committee ever. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. But he didn't know me in high school. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. Why do people get denied tenure? His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . Yeah. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. That's okay. They are . You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. I think, both, actually. I don't agree with what they do. Because they pay for your tuition. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Sean, for my last question, looking forward, I want to reflect on your educational trajectory, and the very uncertain path from graduate school to postdoc, to postdoc to the University of Chicago. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. 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. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. [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. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." 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. 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. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. 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. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. But other people have various ways of getting to the . Some of them might be. I got the Packard Fellowship. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. At the time, . So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. What were the most interesting topics at that time? Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . I'm very happy with that. I think I got this wrong once. Theorists never get this job. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? It was July 4th. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. 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. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. I think, to some extent, yes. It's not overturning all of physics. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. You're not going to get tenure. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? Washington was just a delight. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. Yes, but it's not a very big one. I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. 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. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. No, not really. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. So, I used it for my own purposes. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. The discovery was announced in July. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. And I wasn't working on either one of those. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. In many ways, it was a great book. But that's okay. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. I was still thought to be a desirable property. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. 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. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. 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. The argument I make in the paper is if you are a physicalist, if you exclude by assumption the possibility of non-physical stuff -- that's a separate argument, but first let's be physicalists -- then, we know the laws of physics governing the stuff out of which we are made at the quantum field theory level. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. So, taste matters. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. Well, that's interesting. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. 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. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. What mattered was learning the material. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. 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. So, thank you so much. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? Really, really great guy. So, there's just too many people to talk to, really. So, we wrote a paper. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. It's not a good or a bad kind. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. So, if, five or ten years from now, the sort of things that excite me do not include cutting edge theoretical physics, then so be it. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. I've never cared. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. That's how philosophy goes. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. ", "Is God a good theory? They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. Sean Carroll. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. These were all live possibilities. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. That's it. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. He was doing intellectual work in the process of public outreach, which is really, really hard, and he was just a master at it as well as being an extremely accomplished planetary scientist, and working with NASA and so forth. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. The South Pole telescope is his baby. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. That was great, a great experience. There's no delay on the line. I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. I don't always succeed. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. That's the message I received many, many times. Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. That's not data. I'm on a contract. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. She's very, very good. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. 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." : Saturday 22 March 2014 2:30:00 am", "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine", "Sean Carroll Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship", "Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast Sean Carroll", "Sean Carroll Bridges Spacetime between Science, Hollywood and the Public | American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Meet the professor who helped put the science into Avengers: Endgame", "Sean Carroll the physicist who taught the Avengers all about time", "Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel", "Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time", "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang", "Science and Religion Can't Be Reconciled: Why I won't take money from the Templeton Foundation", "Science & God: Will Biology, Astronomy, Physics Rule Out Existence Of Deity? Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. 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. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. We're kind of out of that. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. Recent Books. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. One, drive research forward. Not especially, no. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. They're rare. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! Graduate school is a different thing. 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. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. So, they keep things at a certain level. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. It was a summer school in Italy. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. Like, ugh. [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]. Or, I could say, "Screw it." The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. So, I was done in 20 minutes. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? 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. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling?
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