Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. There are so many, and it's very easy for me to admit that I suffer from confirmation biases, but it's very hard for me to tell you which ones they are, because we all each individually think that we are perfectly well-calibrating ourselves against our biases, otherwise we would change them in some way. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. I do firmly believe that. I had this email from a woman who said, literally, when she was 12 years old, she was at some event, and she was there with her parents, and they happened to sit next to me at a table, and we talked about particle physics, and she wrote just after she got accepted to the PhD program at Oxford in particle physics, and she said it all started with that conversation. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. It worked for them, and they like it. [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. And now I know it. Stephen Morrow is his name. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. 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. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. Why is that? We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. I got books -- I liked reading. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. It wasn't really clear. As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. I was still thought to be a desirable property. 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're creeping up on it. So, an obvious question arises. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. We hit it off immediately. Not a 100% expectation. Who hasn't written one, really? Sean Carroll's Mindscape - Wondery | Premium Podcasts It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? That's a romance, that's not a reality. But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. But he didn't know me in high school. No preparation needed from me. That's all it is. Like, several of them. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. Would that be on that level? Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. 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. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. Again, I was wrong. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" 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. Very, very important. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. Planning, not my forte. His recent posting on the matter (at . He had to learn it. 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. Fast forward to 2011. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. I think it's part of a continuum. Theorists never get this job. I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. Someone said it. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. I had never quite -- maybe even today, I have still not quite appreciated how important bringing in grant money is to academia. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. The dynamo, the Biermann battery, the inverse cascade, magnetic helicity, plasma effects, all of these things that are kind of hard for my purely theoretical physicist heart to really wrap my mind around. I just think they're wrong. From the outside looking in, you're on record saying that your natural environment for working in theoretical physics is a pen and a pad, and your career as a podcaster, your comfort zone in the digital medium, from the outside looking in, I've been thinking, is there somebody who was better positioned than you to weather the past ten months of social distancing, right? I've never cared. Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? I was in Sidney's office all the time. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. What are the odds? 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. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. That's when I have the most fun. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. 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. We might have met at a cosmology conference. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? It's not good time management, but we did it and we enjoyed it. People still do it. They are . Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? 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. Abdoulaye Doucoure came close to leaving Everton under Frank Lampard I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Did you connect with your father later in life? What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - scientific-know-how.com 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 just did the next step that I was supposed to do. What was your thesis research on? I just drifted away very, very gradually. I will confess the error of my ways. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. That's a different me. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. I like teaching a lot. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. 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. What Is a Tenured Employee? Benefits of Earning This Status Let's start with the research first. There was no internet back then. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. Some people love it. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. So many ideas I want to get on paper. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. So, that was with other graduate students. If you take a calculus class, you learned all these techniques, like the product rule, and what to do with polynomials. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? I have no problems with that. It moved away. Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. 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. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. And they said, "Sure!" It was -- I don't know. We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. A video of the debate can be seen here. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. How Not to Get Tenure - Outside the Beltway It was a very casual procedure. Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist | Heritage Project Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. This didn't shut up the theorists. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. I made that choice consciously. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." Let's just say that. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. 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.