At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. Did you get any question like that? And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? I was ten years old. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. 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?" And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. We hit it off immediately. I had no interest. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. She never went to college. We don't know the theory of everything. "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. I don't think so. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? Well, that's interesting. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. It is remarkable. But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. Is it the perfect situation? 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. 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? Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. Should I explain what that is, or should we assume that people know what that means? We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. Now, can I promise you that the benefit is worth the cost, and I wouldn't actually be better off just sitting down and spending all of my time thinking about that one thing? My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. We should move into that era." It's a very small part of theoretical physics. You get different answers from different people. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. 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. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. It's challenging. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. 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. 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. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. Good. I pretend that they're separate. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. Sean M. Carroll - Wikipedia Melville, NY 11747 So, thank you so much. But, you know, the contingencies of history. One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. We don't know what to do with this." No, not really. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. Who is E Jean Carroll and why did she file a defamation - The Sun They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. So, the paper that I wrote is called The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes. Supervenience is this idea in philosophy that one level depends on another level in a certain way and supervenes on the lower level. The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. My mom was tickled. But I did learn something. And I wasn't working on either one of those. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. We'll figure it out. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub 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. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. This happens quite often. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. It's a research institute in Santa Fe that is devoted to the study of complexity in all its forms. Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Why Sean Carroll is wrong - Quantum Moxie You can't get a non-tenured job. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. But you were. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she I'm very happy with that. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. 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? I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? Carroll, S.B. Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. And this time, first I had to do it all by myself, but because I was again foolishly ambitious, I typed up all the lecture notes, so equations and everything, before each lecture, Xeroxed them and handed them out. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. Let every student carve out a path of study. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one. In retrospect, there's two big things. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. I started blogging in 2004, and I was rejected in 2005 from Chicago. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. The South Pole telescope is his baby. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? 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. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." And who knows, it all worked out okay, but this sort of background, floating, invisible knowledge is really, really important, and was never there for me. I think, now, as wonderful as Villanova was, and I can rhapsodize about what a great experience I had there, but it's nothing like going to a major, top notch university, again, just because of the other students who are around you. Yeah, absolutely. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. So, it was really just a great place. So, that's one important implication. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. 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. It has not. 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?" It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. I did various things. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. So, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Not just that there are different approaches. Then, the other big one was, again, I think the constant lesson as I'm saying all these words out loud is how bad my judgment has been about guiding my own academic career. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. 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. 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. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. 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. "What major research universities care about is research. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure? - Chicago Tribune So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . They actually have gotten some great results. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. Absolutely. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. I took the early universe [class] from Alan. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). I chose wrongly again. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. We just knew we couldn't afford it. Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. "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 . Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. You nerded out entirely. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. We don't understand economics or politics. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. I just think they're wrong. I've got work and it's going well. So, they knew everything that I had done. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. You're old. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . Sorry about that. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. 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. Learn new things about the world. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. It's all worth it in the end. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. Why do people get denied tenure? But I don't remember what it was. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
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