Not especially, no. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. Measure all the matter in the universe. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. That was always true. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. Melville, NY 11747 It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. So, let's get off the tenure thing. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. 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. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. Again, I was wrong. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. Cole. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. 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. 1 Physics Ellipse We hit it off immediately. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. You got a full scholarship there, of course. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. Thank goodness. I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. Move on with it. Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. So, all of those things. 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. So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want . Since I've been ten years old, how about that? Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. I'll just put them on the internet. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. I'm on a contract. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. You're looking under the lamppost. 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. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. You're just too old for that. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. He was a blessing, helping me out. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. There were hints of it. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. You know, I wish I knew. In some extent, it didn't. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. Just get to know people. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. But there were postdocs. And I wasn't working on either one of those. 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. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. And guess what? I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. But I loved it. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. 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. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. There are numerical variables and character variables. 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 was a summer school in Italy. I do this over and over again. 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. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. All of them had the same idea, that the amount of matter in the universe acts as a break on the expansion rate of the universe. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. I was still thought to be a desirable property. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. Do you have any good plans for a book?" Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. You can't get a non-tenured job. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. 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. 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. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. Look at the dynamics of the universe and figure out how much matter there must be in there and compare that to what you would guess the amount of matter should be. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. A stylistic clash, I imagine. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. He is a man of above-average stature. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. That one and a follow up to that. I think there are plenty of physicists. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. It's at least possible. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. So, I said, "Yes, I proposed a book and your wife rejected it.". So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. Sean Carroll Height. 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. 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. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. The book talks about wide range of topics such as submicroscopic components of the universe, whether human existence can have meaning without Godand everything between the two. 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. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. I talked about topological defects, and it was good work, solid work, but they were honestly -- and this is the sort of weird thing -- they said, after I gave the talk and everything, "Look, everyone individually likes you, but no one is sure where you belong." And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? The reason is -- I love Caltech. And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. 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. Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me. There's still fundamental questions. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. 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. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. 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. You don't really need to do much for those. 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. And we started talking, and it was great. 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. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. It was a tough decision, but I made it. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. 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. Sean, for my last question, looking forward, I want to reflect on your educational trajectory, and the very uncertain path from graduate school to postdoc, to postdoc to the University of Chicago. It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. So, late 1997, Phil Lubin, who was an astronomy professor at Santa Barbara, organized a workshop at KITP on measuring cosmological parameters with the cosmic microwave background. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. So, I recognize that. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. 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. The statement added, "This failure is especially . So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. It's funny that you mention law school. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. 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. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. I took almost all the physics classes. And I answered it. It's not just trendiness. I lucked into it, once again. 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. [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. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. 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. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . It was not a very strict Catholic school. He offered 13 pieces of . But then, the thing is, I did. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. 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? 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. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. But it's not what I do research on. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? 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. 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. Yeah, I think that's right. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? 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. Sorry about that. Again, I had great people at MIT. It's a lot of work if you do it right. Yes, but it's not a very big one. The tuition was right. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. We're creeping up on it. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. 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. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." They're not exactly the same activity, but they're part of the same landscape. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. 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. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. Carroll, S.B. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. I don't agree with what they do. This is December 1997. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe?