So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. I really wanted to move that forward. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. 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. Did you do that self-consciously? Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. Oral History Interviews | Sean Carroll | American Institute of Physics But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. I don't know how public knowledge this is. That was my first choice. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. Everyone knew that was real. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. It was a huge success. I'd like to start first with your parents. I really leaned into that. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. That's why I said, "To first approximation." But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. Now, the KITP. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. 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. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. We might have met at a cosmology conference. Why don't people think that way? Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. I think it's gone by now. I put an "s" on both of them. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. This happens quite often. That's just the system. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. And it's not just me. And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. 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. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? I get that all the time. Sean Carroll. These are all very, very hard questions. 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. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. 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. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. 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. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. Well, or I just didn't care. The specific way in which that manifests itself is that when you try to work, or dabble, if you want to put it that way, in different areas, and there are people at your institution who are experts in those specific areas, they're going to judge you in comparison with the best people in your field, in whatever area you just wrote in. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. That's a romance, that's not a reality. My response to him was, "No thanks." But it doesn't hurt. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. As I look from a galaxy to a cluster to large-scale structure, it goes up, and it goes up to .3, and it kind of stays at .3, even as I look at larger and larger things. A stylistic clash, I imagine. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. 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. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. I thought I knew what I was doing. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. Reply Insider . If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. 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." 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. I think it's more that people don't care. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. None of that at Chicago. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. Let's go back to the happier place of science. Not especially, no. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. But he didn't know me in high school. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. What? Cosmologist Sean Carroll doesn't freak out when Darwin is doubted We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. That would be great. 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. Thanks very much. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. Some Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. In many ways, it was a great book. Another paper, another paper, another paper. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. ", "2014 National Convention Los Angeles Freedom From Religion Foundation", "Responding to Sean Carroll: What If There Had Been a Camera at the Resurrection? I'm an atheist. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." There are things the rest of the world is interested in. Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). How did you develop your relationship with George Field? I'm not sure how much time passed. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. I think there are plenty of physicists. You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? It was fine. She's very, very good. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. So, even though the specialists should always be the majority, we non-specialists need to make an effort to push back to be included more than we are. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. Absolutely the same person.". There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. So, an obvious question arises. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. So, thank you so much. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. These were all live possibilities. So, I was still sort of judging where I could possibly go on the basis of what the tuition numbers were, even though, really, those are completely irrelevant. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. I think I did not really feel that, honestly. Not to mention, socialization. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? Evolutionary biology also gives you that. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. So, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. Whereas, my graduate students, I do work, they do work, but I do other things as well. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. And Chicago was somewhere in between. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. I think to first approximation, no. That's a tough thing to do. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. So the bad news is. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. The actual job requirements -- a big part of it, the part that I take most seriously, and care most about -- is advising graduate students. That includes me. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. Later on, I wrote another paper that sort of got me my faculty jobs that pointed out that dark energy could have exactly the same effect. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. 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. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. Why Are Professors Denied Tenure? - YouTube Absolutely. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote.
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