We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. What were the most interesting topics at that time? My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. 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. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. 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. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. This is what I do. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. It's a messy thing. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. I'm very happy with that. Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist | Heritage Project It has not. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. It was -- I don't know. If you take a calculus class, you learned all these techniques, like the product rule, and what to do with polynomials. Okay. Go longer. I explained, and he said he had read this paper that he thought was interesting, by Richard Gott, on time machines, close time-like curves in gravity. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc 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. People didn't take him seriously. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? 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. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. These were people who were at my level. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. That's just the system. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. I get that all the time. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. What about minus 1.1? So, he was an enormous help to me, but it's not like there were twenty other people who were doing the same kind of thing, and you hang out and have lunch and go to parties and talk about Feynman diagrams. He's the best graduate student I've ever had. So the bad news is. I think, they're businesspeople. But most of us didn't think it was real. So, here's another funny story. 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. George and Terry team-taught a course on early universe cosmology using the new book by Kolb and [Michael] Turner that had just come out, because Terry was Rocky Kolb's graduate student at Chicago. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. Then you've come to the right place. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. I think to first approximation, no. No preparation needed from me. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. I think that is part of it. 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. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Yes, well that's true. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. She's very, very good. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? So, I wrote very short chapters. This is December 1997. 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. I taught a couple of courses -- not courses, but like guest lectures when I was in high school. So, I think it can't be overemphasized the extent to which the hard detailed work of theoretical physics is done with pencil and paper, and equations, and pictures, little drawings and so forth, but the ideas come from hanging out with people. They were very bad at first. Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. Let's just say that. I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. 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. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. I'm not sure. None of that at Chicago. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. My response to him was, "No thanks." [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. Here is my thought process. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? I was a good teacher. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. Young universities ditch the tenure system. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. No, not really. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. 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? In fact, no one cited it at the time -- people are catching on now -- but it was on the arrow of time in cosmology and why entropy in the universe is smaller in the past than in the future. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . There's an equation you can point to. Yeah. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. There's no delay on the line. 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. So, I did, and they became very popular. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? Carroll, S.B. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. So, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. So, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. You really have to make a case. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. 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. That's okay. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. It would have been better for me. 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. Like, crazily successful. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. ", "Is God a good theory? Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. She never went to college. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. I also started a new course, general relativity for undergraduates, which had not been taught before, and they loved it. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. So, that was definitely an option. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. Tell us a bit about your new book . There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. Sean Carroll | Department of Biology | University of Maryland Since I've been ten years old, how about that? I don't know. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. I just drifted away very, very gradually. Just get to know people. Carroll has a B.S. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? 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. I think we only collaborated on two papers. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. That's not by itself bad. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. 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. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. He invited a few of us. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. I did always have an interest in -- I don't want to use the word outreach because that sort of has formal connotations, but in reaching out. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. Not necessarily because they were all bookish. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. 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. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. It was fine. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . I have no problems with that. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. 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. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. I'm not going to really worry about it. This is a weird list. Sean Carroll's new book argues quantum physics leads to many worlds Maybe that's not fair. I love writing books so much. Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. Chicago is a little bit in between. An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. This is something that's respectable.". I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. 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. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. 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, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. No, not really. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. How Not to Get Tenure - Outside the Beltway So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. You mean generally across the faculty. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. Russell Wilson Wanted Sean Payton To Replace Pete Carroll With Seahawks? Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? We just knew we couldn't afford it. Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . You can read any one of them on a subway ride. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. But I'm classified as a physicist. "What major research universities care about is research. : Saturday 22 March 2014 2:30:00 am", "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine", "Sean Carroll Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship", "Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast Sean Carroll", "Sean Carroll Bridges Spacetime between Science, Hollywood and the Public | American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Meet the professor who helped put the science into Avengers: Endgame", "Sean Carroll the physicist who taught the Avengers all about time", "Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel", "Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time", "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang", "Science and Religion Can't Be Reconciled: Why I won't take money from the Templeton Foundation", "Science & God: Will Biology, Astronomy, Physics Rule Out Existence Of Deity? It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. Where was string theory, and how much was it on your radar when you were thinking about graduate school and the kinds of things you might pursue for thesis research? So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. So, they had clearly not talked to each other. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. 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. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? 4. 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. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. Yes. Princeton University Press. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches.

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