First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. By the way, all these are hard. His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. I had no interest. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. But it was kind of overwhelming. He wrote wonderful popular books. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. So, here's another funny story. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. And at least a year passed. Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. And they said, "Sure!" Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. Who was on your thesis committee? Go longer. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. My mom was tickled. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. Completely blindsided. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. This is an example of it. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. And it's not just me. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. Being on the debate team, trying to work through different attitudes, back and forth. You're not going to get tenure. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. People still do it. Tell us a bit about your new book . Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. 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. We could discover what the dark matter is. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. That's not what I do for a living. Another bad planning on my part. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. I just think they're wrong. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. Let's put it that way. But I did learn something. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. Literally, my office mate, while I was in graduate school, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating universe -- not while he was in graduate school, but later. In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. He invited a few of us. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. Well, most people got tenure. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? Honestly, I still think the really good book about the accelerating universe has yet to be written. They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. 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. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. ", "Is God a good theory? So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. But there's an enormous influence put on your view of reality by all of these pre-existing propositions that you think are probably true. This happens quite often. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. Huge excitement because of this paper. 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. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. I don't think it has anything to do with what's more important, or fundamental, or exciting, or better science, but there is a certain kind of discipline that you learn in learning physics, and a certain bag of tricks and intellectual guiding stars that you pick up that are very, very helpful. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. So, again, I foolishly said yes. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. 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 . It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. Physics does give you that. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. Yes, but it's not a very big one. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" That's a recognized thing that's going on. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? It's just like being a professor. Part of my finally, at last, successful attempt to be more serious on the philosophical side of things, I'm writing a bunch of invited papers for philosophy-edited volumes. No, quite the opposite. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? Benefits of tenure. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. Certainly, no one academic in my family. Where are the equations I can solve? But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. But part of the utopia that we don't live in, that I would like to live in, would be people who are trying to make intellectual contributions [should] be judged on the contributions and less on the format in which they were presented. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. 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. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. It was a huge success. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. Yeah, no, good. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. Again, I was wrong. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. Sean Carroll. 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. You're just too old for that. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . This is something that's respectable.". I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. I think we only collaborated on two papers. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. 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've guessed. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. [53][third-party source needed]. I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. 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. Get on with your life. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. 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. Or, maybe I visited there, but just sort of unofficially. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. Thank goodness. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. There was no internet back then. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. They are . [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. Then, you enter graduate school as more or less a fully formed person, and you learn to do science. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. Not especially, no. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. They were very bad at first. 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. So, and it's good to be positive about the great things about science and academia and so forth, but then you can be blindsided. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. 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 . Like, crazily successful. So, I wrote very short chapters. You really have to make a case. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. But, you know, the contingencies of history. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? 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. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." I did always have an interest in -- I don't want to use the word outreach because that sort of has formal connotations, but in reaching out. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. The discovery was announced in July. But you're good at math. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. "What major research universities care about is research. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." 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. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. I don't know how public knowledge this is. Moving on after tenure denial. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." I said, "Well, yeah, I did. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much.
Jacob De La Hoya,
Are House Geckos Dangerous,
Rust Twitch Drops Round 13,
Tim Scanlan Lawyer Monique Wright,
When Was The Last Shark Attack In The Mediterranean?,
Articles W