You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. 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. That's how philosophy goes. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. This is a non-tenured position. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. Who was on your thesis committee? The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. It was hard to figure out what the options were. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. So, George was randomly assigned to me. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. Like, I did it. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. I think, they're businesspeople. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. Having said that, they're still really annoying. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" 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. 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. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. It is January 4th, 2021. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. 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. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. Cole. So, I recognize that. 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. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. 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. That's the case I tried to make. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. Physics does give you that. Then why are you wasting my time? It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. There's an equation you can point to. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. So, I went to a large public school. So far so good. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. 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. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. Right. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. That's right. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. That was my talk. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. It will never be the largest. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. They come in different varieties. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. 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. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. I really leaned into that. You're not going to get tenure. I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. Oh, yeah, entirely. Princeton University Press. 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. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" And that's not bad or cynical. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. 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. What can I write down? Recent Books. 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. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. He used that to offer me a job, to pay my salary. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. 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. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? I think, to some extent, yes. These were all live possibilities. Again, in my philosophy of pluralism, there should be both kinds. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. These were people who were at my level. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. I did everything right. It was fine. It's not a good or a bad kind. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. We just knew we couldn't afford it. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. Institute for Theoretical Physics. So, I was behind already. 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? 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." And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. 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. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. I don't want to say anything against them. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. 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? Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. 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. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. Yeah. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. 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. 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. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. 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. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. But you were. We're kind of out of that. So, that would happen. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? Walking the Tenure Tightrope. but academe is treacherous. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. 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. Hopefully it'll work out. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. Also, assistant professor, right? Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. I was in Sidney's office all the time. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? 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. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. 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. [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. It's a junior faculty job. Very, very much. Yeah, so actually, I should back up a little bit, because like I said, at Harvard, there were no string theorists. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. It was a summer school in Italy. Faculty are used to disappointment. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. Again, I was wrong over and over again. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. And it was a . 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. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. It worked for them, and they like it. 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? So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. At the end of the five-year term, they ask all the Packard fellows to come to the meeting and give little talks on what they did. 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. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. 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. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. I have a lot of graduate students. But it's not what I do research on. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. Again, I was wrong. Powerful people from all over the place go there. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. Also, they were all really busy and tired. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. So, let's get off the tenure thing. 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? That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. There's always some institutional resistance. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? That's my question. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. But it's worked pretty well for me. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? Some field needs to care. Honestly, I still think the really good book about the accelerating universe has yet to be written. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. Martin White. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. My response to him was, "No thanks." You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. When I told Ed Guinan, my undergraduate advisor, that I had George Field as an advisor, he said, "Oh, you got lucky." Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road Would that be on that level? I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. But, I mean, I have no shortage of papers I want to write in theoretical physics. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. [53][third-party source needed]. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? Who did you work with? That's the job. So, I suspect that they are here to stay.
2 Scrambled Eggs Calories With Cheese,
Lockheed Martin Pension Death Benefit,
How To Fix Undercooked Refried Beans,
Articles W