. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. That one and a follow up to that. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? 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. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. Who hasn't written one, really? 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. At the time, . Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. I wrote a big review article about it. The discovery was announced in July. 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 . She could pinpoint it there. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. They're a little bit less intimidated. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. The polarization of light from the CMB might be rotated just a little bit as it travels through space. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. So, they said, "Here's what we'll do. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . I love people who are just so passionate about their little specialty. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical 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. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. 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. Why is that? I haven't given it up yet. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. You get dangerous. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. ", "Making Sense Podcast #124 In Search of Reality", "Alan Wallace and Sean Carroll on The Nature of Reality", "Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll, and Laura Mersini-Hougton debate the Big Bang and Creation Myths", "Episode 28: Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe Sean Carroll", "Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books", Oral history interview transcript with Sean Carroll on 4 January 2021, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, Video introduction to Sean Carroll's lectures "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sean_M._Carroll&oldid=1141102312. He used that to offer me a job, to pay my salary. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. I just want to say. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. It's at least possible. No, no. 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. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. 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]. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. Field. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." Young people. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). These are all very, very hard questions. No one told me. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. That's right. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. Let's get back to Villanova. So, I was behind already. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . 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. 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 a messy thing. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. I'm close enough. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. I just don't want to do that anymore. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. So, an obvious question arises. Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. Oh, there aren't any? Martin White. But you were. And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. 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. I don't want to say anything against them. 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 think people like me should have an easier time. 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. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. That's a recognized thing that's going on. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. He offered 13 pieces of . I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. It's not just a platitude. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." It's not overturning all of physics. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. Let's sit and think about this seriously." That's not what I do for a living. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. We should move into that era." 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, just show that any of our theories are wrong. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. And I said, "But I did do that." Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. So, that was a benefit. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. That's the message I received many, many times. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. Let's just take the risk, and if they don't work out they won't get tenure." The tenure decision is very different than the hiring decision. But maybe it could. You're old. 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. I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. Then why are you wasting my time? As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. 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. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. Not to mention, socialization. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. So, again, I foolishly said yes. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. But it's worked pretty well for me. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. It's the path to achieving tenure. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. They're not in the job of making me feel good. You don't really need to do much for those. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. Not especially, no. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. . 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. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. I just think they're wrong. I've done it. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. So, I wrote very short chapters. 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. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. Very, very important. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. Theorists never get this job. This is the advice I tell my students. 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. And it was a . The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. College Park, MD 20740 A video of the debate can be seen here. There's good physics reasons. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. Hopefully it'll work out. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). Let's just say that. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. 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, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. And you mean not just in physics. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. 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. And I wasn't working on either one of those. That's a different me. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. 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.
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