We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? Carroll, S.B. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. There's always exceptions to that. And we started talking, and it was great. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. (2020) A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.Princeton University Press. I know the field theory. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. We should move into that era." It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. So, it's incredibly liberating because I don't have to keep up with the billion other papers that people are writing in the hot topics. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. I'll just put them on the internet. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. I'm not going to really worry about it. He's supposed to answer the questions." Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. I've gotten good at it. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. My mom was tickled. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. The reason is -- I love Caltech. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. Came up with a good idea. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. The discussion with Stuart Bartlett was no exception. All of the ability I have to give talks, and anything like that, has come from working at it. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. So, I did, and they became very popular. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. . Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. The whole bit. Well, that's not an experimental discovery. And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. It will never be the largest. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. And the answer is, to most people, there is. Oh, yeah. 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? Graduate school is a different thing. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . There are things the rest of the world is interested in. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. This didn't shut up the theorists. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. I just think they're wrong. I like her a lot. Oh, yeah, entirely. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. Young people. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. 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. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. I had it. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. This is so exciting because you are one of the best interviewers out there, so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Like, ugh. I had the results. We'll measure it." So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. That's a very hard question. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. I had never quite -- maybe even today, I have still not quite appreciated how important bringing in grant money is to academia. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . So, we talked about different possibilities. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. It seems that when you finally got to Caltech, it all clicked for you. Sean Carroll on free will. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. 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. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. Sean Carroll. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. Three, tell people about it. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. It just came out of the blue. But there definitely has been a shift. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. I remember, on the one hand, I did it and I sat down thinking it was really bad and I didn't do very well. So, there's just too many people to talk to, really. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion", published in September 2022.[15]. 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? 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. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. Or, I could say, "Screw it." It's not what I want to do. It's still pretty young. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. Don't have "a bad year.". There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. It worked for them, and they like it. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. That's my question. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. We made a new prediction for the microwave background, which was very interesting. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? 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? So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. They were very bad at first. Yeah, absolutely. So, the paper that I wrote is called The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes. Supervenience is this idea in philosophy that one level depends on another level in a certain way and supervenes on the lower level. Melville, NY 11747 When I told Ed Guinan, my undergraduate advisor, that I had George Field as an advisor, he said, "Oh, you got lucky." And I said, "But I did do that." It doesn't lead to new technology. 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. 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. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. But I don't know what started it. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. More than just valid. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that. Let's put it that way. What are we going to do? What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. That includes me. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. So, the technology is always there. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? Now, look, if I'm being objective, maybe this dramatically decreases my chances of having a paper that makes a big impact, because I'm not writing papers that other people are already focused on. I had the best thesis committee ever. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. 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. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. 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?" Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. This is something that's respectable.". Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. In fact, no one cited it at the time -- people are catching on now -- but it was on the arrow of time in cosmology and why entropy in the universe is smaller in the past than in the future. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . And I said, "Yeah, sure." Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." No one told me. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence.
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