But he didn't know me in high school. I got books -- I liked reading. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. We'll have to see. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. 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. 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. 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. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. Young people. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. So, an obvious question arises. And it was great. But I did learn something. Measure all the matter in the universe. So, a lot of the reasons why my path has been sort of zig-zaggy and back and forth is because -- I guess, the two reasons are: number one, I didn't have great sources of advice, and number two, I wasn't very good at taking the advice when I got it. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. George didn't know the stuff. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. [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. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. We could discover what the dark matter is. And it's not just me. 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. We're creeping up on it. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. At Los Alamos, yes. They're not in the job of making me feel good. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. Sean Carroll's new book argues quantum physics leads to many worlds I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. @seanmcarroll . And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. No, no, I kind of like it here. It's challenging. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. That's the job. Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. 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. Yeah, no, good. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. Who did you work with? [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. We'll figure it out. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. 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. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. Sean, we've brought the narrative right up to the present, so much so that we know exactly what you should be working on right now. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. 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. They have a certain way of doing things. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. Also, assistant professor, right? It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. Powerful people from all over the place go there. Why did you do that?" (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. So, they keep things at a certain level. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. Sean Carroll's Mindscape - Wondery | Premium Podcasts What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. Let's put it that way. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? Three, tell people about it. Thank you for inviting me on. Russell Wilson Wanted Sean Payton To Replace Pete Carroll With Seahawks? We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? 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. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. The system has benefited them. So far so good. You know, I wish I knew. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. You really have to make a case. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. So, that would happen. 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. 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. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. 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. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" I can do it, and it is fun. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? She could pinpoint it there. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure? - Chicago Tribune That's really the lesson I want to get across here. I won't say a know-it-all attitude, because I don't necessarily think I knew it all, but I did think that I knew what was best for myself. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." So, he founded that. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? 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? Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. I've gotten good at it. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. I don't want that left out of the historical record. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? That's what I am. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. So, thank you so much. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. Moving-tenure-denial - Chemical & Engineering News She's very, very good. That's not data. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. That was always temporary. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. 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. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide.