No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. Who knows? 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. Why don't people think that way? One, drive research forward. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. [53][third-party source needed]. I've never cared. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. So, I want to do something else. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. It's just like being a professor. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. I think all three of those things are valid and important. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. We used Wald, and it was tough. You nerded out entirely. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. I had an astronomy degree, and I'd hung out with cosmologists, so I knew the buzzwords and everything, but I hadn't read the latest papers. It is incredibly draining for me to do it. We don't know the theory of everything. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. Having said that, the slight footnote is you open yourself up, if you are a physicist who talks about other things, to people saying, "Stick to physics." theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Everyone knew that was real. Or other things. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. 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?" By the way, all these are hard. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. Physics does give you that. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. Came up with a good idea. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. Why do people get denied tenure? It's not overturning all of physics. But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? Maybe not. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. I think that is part of it. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. I think to first approximation, no. It's a junior faculty job. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . I was still thought to be a desirable property. I was really surprised." What sparked that interest in you? I love writing books so much. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. No sensible person doubted they would happen. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. What was your thought process along those lines? At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. Perhaps, to get back to an earlier comment about some of the things that are problematic about academic faculty positions, as you say, yes, sometimes there is a positive benefit to trends, but on the other hand, when you're establishing yourself for an academic career, that's a career that if all goes well will last for many, many decades where trends come and go. 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." So, an obvious question arises. Go longer. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. I got a lot of books on astronomy. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. 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. It's not what I want to do. 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. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. 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. I took the early universe [class] from Alan. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. We knew he's going pass." That's just not my thing. Why Lorgia Garca Pea Was Denied Tenure at Harvard because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. 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, that's how I started working with Alan. It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. Let's face it, quantum mechanics, gravitation, cosmology, these are fields that need a lot of help. That's it. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. 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 . I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. Sean Carroll on Consciousness, Physicalism, and the History of It's not good time management, but we did it and we enjoyed it. Let's go back to the happier place of science. I think it was like $800 million. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. 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. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. 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. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. Everything is going great. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. The University of Chicago Magazine Russell Wilson Wanted Sean Payton To Replace Pete Carroll With Seahawks? And I didn't. Now, next year, I'll get a job. Let's put it that way. There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." I know the field theory. Huge excitement because of this paper. We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. 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. But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. There's a bunch. Sean Carroll (Author of The Big Picture) - Goodreads I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Euclid's laws work pretty well. We wrote a lot of papers together. 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. Why did you do that?" Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. 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. Who hasn't written one, really? 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? 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. 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. So, let's get off the tenure thing. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. It was a summer school in Italy. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. So, I was done in 20 minutes. Sean, we've brought the narrative right up to the present, so much so that we know exactly what you should be working on right now. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. 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. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. Why tenure is so important yet rare for Black professors But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. 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. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. At the time, . More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? But it's not what I do research on. 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. 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. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. You should apply." He wrote wonderful popular books. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? So, I suspect that they are here to stay. The tuition was right. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara.
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