And it was great. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. But he didn't know me in high school. So, my three years at Santa Barbara, every single year, I thought I'll just get a faculty job this year, and my employability plummeted. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. So, there's three quarters in an academic year. They decide to do physics for a living. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. What were the most interesting topics at that time? For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? But there's plenty of smart people working on that. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. That's the opposite. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. These are all very, very hard questions. 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. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. Who was on your thesis committee? Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. The original typescript is available. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Again, stuff that has not been that useful to me, but I just loved it so much, as well as philosophy and literature classes at Harvard. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. I think both grandfathers worked for U.S. Steel. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. It's not just a platitude. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. The reason is -- I love Caltech. His article "Does the Universe Need God?" What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. 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. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. So, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. 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. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. So, here's another funny story. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. 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, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. But you're good at math. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. This could be great. Go longer. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. Amy Bishop and the Trauma of Tenure Denial | Psychology Today 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. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . 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. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Really, really great guy. I don't want that left out of the historical record. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. He was a blessing, helping me out. It's challenging. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. 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, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. Oral History Interviews | Sean Carroll | American Institute of Physics Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com It's all worth it in the end. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. I was really surprised." If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. Tenure denials - The Philosophers' Cocoon @seanmcarroll . [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. So, like I said, I really love topology. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. That's okay. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. 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? If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. The unions were anathema. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Too Much Information? - Inside Higher Ed There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. What's so great about right now? But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the 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. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? I think it's part of a continuum. He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. No, not really. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. The four of us wrote a paper. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. I have a short attention span. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. There's a lot of inertia. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. And it was a . So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. I made that choice consciously. What could I do? I like her a lot. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. The whole bit. 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?" I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. 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? As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. It had gotten a little stuck. That's not all of it. That's a romance, that's not a reality. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. The two advantages I can think of are, number one, at that time, it's a very specific time, late '80s, early '90s -- specific in the sense that both particle physics and astronomy were in a lull. So, there was the physics department, and the astronomy department, and there was also what's called the Enrico Fermi Institute, which was a research institute, but it was like half of the physics department and half of the astronomy department was in it. But it gives lip service to the ideal of 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.". I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. It's the path to achieving tenure. What about minus 1.1? It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. I've got work and it's going well. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States.