I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. They come in different varieties. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. I explained, and he said he had read this paper that he thought was interesting, by Richard Gott, on time machines, close time-like curves in gravity. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. It's not a good or a bad kind. That's a tough thing to do. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. Like, ugh. I'll be back. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. You mean generally across the faculty. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. Absolutely. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. : 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? They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. 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? It falls short of that goal in some other ways. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. I pretend that they're separate. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Advertising on podcasts is really effective compared to TV or radio or webpages. Move on with it. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. They basically admitted that. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. Chicago is a little bit in between. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. But the idea that there's any connection with what we do as professional scientists and these bigger questions about the nature of reality is just not one that modern physicists have. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. 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, 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. I was in Sidney's office all the time. . Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? [53][third-party source needed]. 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. I have a lot of graduate students. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. @seanmcarroll . -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Three, tell people about it. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. Why Lorgia Garca Pea Was Denied Tenure at Harvard He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. What could I do? I'll just put them on the internet. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. 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.". Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. These were all live possibilities. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. But it doesn't hurt. I think I did not really feel that, honestly. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. What are the odds? So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. And I answered it. 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. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. 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. So, again, I foolishly said yes. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. I just drifted away very, very gradually. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. 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. This is a weird list. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. It just came out of the blue. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. 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. I have a short attention span. There's a few, but it's a small number. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. Honestly, I still think the really good book about the accelerating universe has yet to be written. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? You don't get paid for doing it. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist | Heritage Project To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Let's put it that way. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? Who hasn't written one, really? But he didn't know me in high school. Mark Hoffman was his name. No, you're completely correct. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? Sean Carroll Family. He was a very senior guy. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. Maybe that's not fair. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. Learn new things about the world. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. No, not really. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. So, an obvious question arises. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. And I said, "Yeah, sure." Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. Okay. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? So, they knew everything that I had done. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? And that's the only thing you do. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. I just want to say. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? Do you want to put them all in the same basket? We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. Oh, kinds of physics. So, I was behind already. So, he founded that. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. We just knew we couldn't afford it. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. It's a lot of work if you do it right. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." Sean Carroll's new book argues quantum physics leads to many worlds But, I mean, I have no shortage of papers I want to write in theoretical physics. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. And he's like, "Sure." We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. His recent posting on the matter (at . If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. But I'm classified as a physicist. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. So, George was randomly assigned to me. Why Sean Carroll is wrong - Quantum Moxie You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. So, I'm really quite excited about this. in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. 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. He offered 13 pieces of . Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. He wrote wonderful popular books. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. 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. Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" 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?" Another paper, another paper, another paper. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas.