That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. 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]. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. So, that was one big thing. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. Oh, kinds of physics. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. 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. 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. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. Really, really great guy. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. 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. The polarization of light from the CMB might be rotated just a little bit as it travels through space. Here is my thought process. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . Someone said it. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. I don't always succeed. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. 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. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. So, I'm a big believer in the disciplines, but it would be at least fun to experiment with the idea of a university that just hired really good people. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. You should not let w be less than minus one." I just think they're wrong. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. @seanmcarroll . Whereas, my graduate students, I do work, they do work, but I do other things as well. 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? If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. MIT was a weird place in various ways. So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? In some extent, it didn't. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. 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. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? You've been around the block a few times. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. What were the most interesting topics at that time? A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Did you do that self-consciously? Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. Good. That was always temporary. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. Moving on after tenure denial. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. And Chicago was somewhere in between. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? Since I wrote 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. And you mean not just in physics. 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. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. Onondaga County. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? No preparation needed from me. It was -- I don't know. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. That's fine. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. 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. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. He is not at all ashamed to tell you that and explains things sometimes in his talks about cosmology by reference to his idea about God's existence. 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. He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. 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. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. I think so. His recent posting on the matter (at . In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. And at least a year passed. Yes, well that's true. 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. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. 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. 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. Just get to know people. This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. And he said, "Yes, sure." I'm trying to finish a paper right now. Sean Carroll Family. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. Dutton, $29. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. 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. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. Reply Insider . That's okay. Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." Then why are you wasting my time? None of that at Chicago. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. Or a biochemist, right? I do firmly believe that. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. Sorry about that. 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. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. 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. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. It's challenging. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. 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. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. He was a blessing, helping me out. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. . You got a full scholarship there, of course. 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. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. They seem unnatural to us. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. You can't get a non-tenured job. There's nobody working on using insights from the foundation of quantum mechanics to help understand quantum gravity, or at least, very, very few people. But it's worked pretty well for me. 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. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. 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, that was a benefit. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. That's a romance, that's not a reality. One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. 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. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. There's this huge gap in between what we give the popular press, where I have to fight for three equations in my book, and a textbook, which is three equations every paragraph. They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. I'm an atheist. I think it's gone by now. So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. Let's go back to the happier place of science. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. 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. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. I'm not sure. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular.
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