I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? I will." Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. At the time, . So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Sean Carroll Height. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. Amy Bishop and the Trauma of Tenure Denial | Psychology Today There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. 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. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. All while I was in Santa Barbara. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. I like her a lot. I was ten years old. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. 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. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. Having said that, they're still really annoying. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." 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. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. I like the idea of debate. You're old. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. It's funny when that happens. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. But it doesn't hurt. I love writing books so much. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. The four of us wrote a paper. They're a little bit less intimidated. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. Were your family's sensibilities working class or more middle class, would you say? I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? We'll figure it out. 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 moved away. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. I was taking Fortran. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. That's okay. There's still fundamental questions. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. I was less good of a fit there. So, we talked about different possibilities. Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. That's just not my thing. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. Go longer. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. I do firmly believe that. It has not. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. It's difficult, yes. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? So, again, I foolishly said yes. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. It's a necessary thing but the current state of theoretical physicists is guessing. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. We're creeping up on it. 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. 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." Do you go to the economics department or the history department? There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? It wasn't really clear. Yeah, I think that's right. Carroll, S.B. What you would guess is the universe is expanding, and how fast it's expanding is related to that amount of density of the universe in a very particular way. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. 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. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. [37] 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. I know the field theory. Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. Too Much Information? - Inside Higher Ed I lucked into it, once again. Who was on your thesis committee? 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. [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? 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. I've got work and it's going well. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. So, every person who came, [every] graduate student, was assigned an advisor, a faculty member, to just sort of guide them through their early years. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. They're rare. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. 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. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. What Is Time? | Professor Sean Carroll Explains Presentism and Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. And I love it when they're interested in outreach or activism or whatever, but I say, "Look, if you want to do that as a professional physicist, you've got to prioritize getting a job as a professional physicist." That was my talk. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. 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. Euclid's laws work pretty well. So, I want to do something else. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. ", "Is God a good theory? It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? Graduate school is a different thing. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. This is probably 2000. I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? I remember that. And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. I really do think that in some sense, the amount that a human being is formed and shaped, as a human being, not as a scientist, is greater when they're an undergraduate than when they're a graduate. There's an equation you can point to. Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). 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. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism.