I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. I'm an atheist. 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? Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. Very, very important. He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, because he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion. We've already established that. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. It worked for them, and they like it. Carroll, S.B. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. It was -- I don't know. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. Let's start with the research first. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. 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. Who did you work with? I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. I just want to say. But there definitely has been a shift. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. But it's worked pretty well for me. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. We certainly never worked together. I think we only collaborated on two papers. I had it. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. Let's put it that way. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. I think to first approximation, no. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. He was a very senior guy. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. [53][third-party source needed]. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. Good. I just think they're wrong. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. He offered 13 pieces of . Well, I just did the dumbest thing. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . I got a lot of books on astronomy. They come in different varieties. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. This happens quite often. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. So, the technology is always there. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. 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. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. This is real physics. If you actually take a scientific attitude toward the promotion of science, you can study what kinds of things work, and what kinds of approaches are most effective. They decide to do physics for a living. That's absolutely true. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. They're rare. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. 4. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. Three, tell people about it. But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. You've been around the block a few times. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Let every student carve out a path of study. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. I was in Sidney's office all the time. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. That doesn't work. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. We're not developing a better smart phone. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. No, quite the opposite. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. I think, both, actually. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? Not just that there are different approaches. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. 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." I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? Like, okay, this is a lot of money. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. There was no internet back then. 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 would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. It was a huge success. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. 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. 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. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. This is December 1997. That's a different me. 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? That would have been a very different conversation if I had. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. Just get to know people. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. He is a man of above-average stature. 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. But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. All of which is to say, once I got to Caltech, I did start working in broadening myself, but it was slow, and it wasn't my job. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. Is it the perfect situation? I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. I wrote a big review article about it. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . What's so great about right now? They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Or, maybe I visited there, but just sort of unofficially. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? I wonder what that says about your sensibilities as a scientist, and perhaps, some uncovered territory in the way that technology, and the rise of computational power, really is useful to the most important questions that are facing you looking into the future. I have a short attention span. He's the best graduate student I've ever had. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. I did everything right. 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. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. Now, the academic titles. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. 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. No one told me. My response to him was, "No thanks." Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. Not a 100% expectation. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. It might have been by K.C. The dynamo, the Biermann battery, the inverse cascade, magnetic helicity, plasma effects, all of these things that are kind of hard for my purely theoretical physicist heart to really wrap my mind around. And I knew that. I made that choice consciously. What could I do? That was great, a great experience. Tenure denial, seven years later. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. I think, they're businesspeople. So the bad news is. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. 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. Six months is a very short period of time. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. People didn't take him seriously. There was, but it was kind of splintered because of this large number of people. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. I like the idea of debate. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. That was my talk. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. I had the results. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. 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. But, you know, the contingencies of history. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. I had the best thesis committee ever. I get that all the time. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. David, my pleasure. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. That one and a follow up to that. 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. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. I'd like to start first with your parents. No, no, I kind of like it here. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. 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? 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. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." He explains the factors that led to his undergraduate education at Villanova, and his graduate work at Harvard, where he specialized in astronomy under the direction of George Field. So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. I have zero interest in whether someone is doing a hot topic thing for a faculty hire, exactly like you said. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? So, thank you so much. 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. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. And in the meantime, Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and others, came up with this idea of phantom energy, which had w less than minus one. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. But it doesn't hurt. Thanks very much. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. You know, students are very different. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. Or, I could say, "Screw it." But other people have various ways of getting to the . Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. And that got some attention also. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . Again, I was wrong. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. Some field needs to care. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. This could be great. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. That's not all of it. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. southern baptist preachers looking for a church, florida death notices 2021,
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