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. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. It was a summer school in Italy. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. 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. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. It's not overturning all of physics. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. The South Pole telescope is his baby. Now, next year, I'll get a job. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. And part of it was because no one told me. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. 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. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." So, I was behind already. So, I said, well, how do you do that? I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. I took almost all the physics classes. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. I do firmly believe that. One of them was a joke because one of them was a Xerox copy of my quantum field theory final exam that Sidney Coleman had graded and really given me a hard time. I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. 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? it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. She could pinpoint it there. There's an equation you can point to. I'm enough of a particle physicist. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. Someone like me, for example, who is very much a physicist, but also is interested in philosophy, and I would like to be more active even than I am at philosophy at the official level, writing papers and things like that. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. It worked for them, and they like it. Martin White. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? You know the answer to that." Some Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. No, quite the opposite. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. Why don't people think that way? It was a very casual procedure. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. That's fine. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. And it was great. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. It was a tough decision, but I made it. 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. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. 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. . I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. It's just really, really hard." (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . Well, or I just didn't care. 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 might have been by K.C. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. 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. 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. Yeah. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. 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. 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. 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. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. We don't care what you do with it." In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. Because you've been at it long enough now, what have been some of the most efficacious strategies that you've found to join those two difficulties? In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she You don't really need to do much for those. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. The argument I make in the paper is if you are a physicalist, if you exclude by assumption the possibility of non-physical stuff -- that's a separate argument, but first let's be physicalists -- then, we know the laws of physics governing the stuff out of which we are made at the quantum field theory level. I had no interest. It doesn't lead to new technology. Oh, yeah, absolutely. 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 . So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. 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. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. I did everything right. 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. 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. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. That's what I am. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. Oh, yeah. You know, I wish I knew. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. 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. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. It's an honor. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. I have no problems with that. This could be great. Then you've come to the right place. 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. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. All of them had the same idea, that the amount of matter in the universe acts as a break on the expansion rate of the universe. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. 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. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. Why is that? So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. 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. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. That includes me. Let's face it, quantum mechanics, gravitation, cosmology, these are fields that need a lot of help. Some people love it. That's the opposite. So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. 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. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. 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. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. Sean, to go back to the question in high school about whether or not a Harvard or a Princeton was on your radar, I'm curious, as a junior or a senior at Villanova, given that economically, and even geographically, you were not so far away from where you were as a high schooler, what had changed where now a place like a Harvard would have seemed within reach? What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she 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 taught what was called a big picture course. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. Everyone knew that was real. What to do if you're facing tenure denial | Small Pond Science But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. 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. But it doesn't hurt. So, George was randomly assigned to me. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. I do this over and over again. Three, tell people about it. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. Would I be interested in working on it with him? Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. 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. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. She never went to college. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." 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. I got books -- I liked reading. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. It has not. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. 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 don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. Too Much Information? - Inside Higher Ed