That's when I have the most fun. 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, 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, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. 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 . 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. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. I do this over and over again. 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. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX, American Association of Physicists in Medicine, AVS: Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. ", "Is God a good theory? Remember, I applied there to go to undergraduate school there. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. 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. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. Moving on after tenure denial. I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. Alright, Sean. Young universities ditch the tenure system. There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. You nerded out entirely. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. Again, I was wrong over and over again. Not just that there are different approaches. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. Being surrounded by the best people was really, really important to me. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. Yes, well that's true. The unions were anathema. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. 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. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. 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? We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. 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. A derivative is the slope of something. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. 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? Well, one ramification of that is technological. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. This is the advice I tell my students. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. 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. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. There's good physics reasons. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. 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, 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. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. I'll just put them on the internet. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. 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. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. 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. That was not on my radar. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. People know who you are. So, we talked about different possibilities. 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? 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. What happens if tenure is denied? - Tracks-movie.com People like Wayne Hu came out of that. So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. I just drifted away very, very gradually. 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. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. I love that, and they love my paper. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. It's not just trendiness. I had this email from a woman who said, literally, when she was 12 years old, she was at some event, and she was there with her parents, and they happened to sit next to me at a table, and we talked about particle physics, and she wrote just after she got accepted to the PhD program at Oxford in particle physics, and she said it all started with that conversation. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. Thank you for inviting me on. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. I'm not sure. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? There was, but it was kind of splintered because of this large number of people. [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" She said, "John is right, and I was also right. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? How did you develop your relationship with George Field? Well, or I just didn't care. Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. You were starting to do that. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. 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. 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. They seem unnatural to us. Okay. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? The whole bit. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. There's no other input that you have. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. You're not going to get tenure. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. We've already established that. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. He offered 13 pieces of . You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. The tuition was right. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. That's why I said, "To first approximation." They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. 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. At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. @seanmcarroll . This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. What are the Different Reasons for Being Denied Tenure? That's what supervenience means. I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. You're looking under the lamppost. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. That's the opposite. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. 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? This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. Is it the perfect situation? So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit Hopefully it'll work out. Oh, yeah, entirely. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. It's just like being a professor. 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. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. Sean Carroll - Chief Procurement Officer - NYS Office of General You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. 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. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. 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. It's not just a platitude. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. Don't have "a bad year.". On Carroll's view the universe begins to exist at the Big Bang only in the sense that a yardstick begins to exist at the first inch. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. They're like, what is a theory? At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure 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. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time.
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