Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. That was not on my radar. I think it's bad in the following way. We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. So, George was randomly assigned to me. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. Spread the word. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? So, here's another funny story. 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. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. 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. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. But it's worked pretty well for me. And I didn't. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. At Harvard, it's the opposite. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. But I don't know what started it. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. You're looking under the lamppost. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. That was always temporary. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. No, not really. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. That would be great. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. 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. I get that all the time. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. 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. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. 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. So, I wrote very short chapters. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. It had gotten a little stuck. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. And that got some attention also. I can do it, and it is fun. You were starting to do that. I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. They're not in the job of making me feel good. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). My grandfather was a salesman, etc. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. The statement added, "This failure is especially . It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. I chose wrongly again. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. So, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. Well, sorry, also one string theorist: Barton Zwiebach was there. 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. Thanks very much. He was doing intellectual work in the process of public outreach, which is really, really hard, and he was just a master at it as well as being an extremely accomplished planetary scientist, and working with NASA and so forth. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. Whereas the accelerated universe was a surprise. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. Like, that's a huge thing. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. That's it. 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? But it's not what I do research on. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. Right. It was a big hit to. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. 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. At the end of the five-year term, they ask all the Packard fellows to come to the meeting and give little talks on what they did. It's just like being a professor. In retrospect, there's two big things. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. Then, I'm happy to admit, if someone says, "Oh, you have to do a podcast interview," it's like, ah, I don't want to do this now. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. 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. Right. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. Came up with a good idea. You got a full scholarship there, of course. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. Everyone knows about that. One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. I think, they're businesspeople. [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. College Park, MD 20740 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. Again, stuff that has not been that useful to me, but I just loved it so much, as well as philosophy and literature classes at Harvard. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. So, there's three quarters in an academic year. It was a very casual procedure. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. You have enough room to get it right. I think there are plenty of physicists. He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, because he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. Another bad planning on my part. I taught a couple of courses -- not courses, but like guest lectures when I was in high school. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. Graduate school is a different thing. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. Thank you for inviting me on. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. I really leaned into that. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. So, every person who came, [every] graduate student, was assigned an advisor, a faculty member, to just sort of guide them through their early years. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. It might have been by K.C. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. But then, the thing is, I did. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. 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. 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. I didn't really want to live there. Did you connect with your father later in life? So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? You can't get a non-tenured job. You should apply." He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. That's the case I tried to make. 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. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. So, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. 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. He wrote wonderful popular books. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. It's not what I want to do. 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. Yeah, it absolutely is great. Or other things. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. I said, "Well, yeah, I did. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. So, all of those things. That's how philosophy goes. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. Here is my thought process. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. 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. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. That's what really makes me feel successful. Now, the KITP. I do this over and over again. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" The system has benefited them. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. No, no. So, even though the specialists should always be the majority, we non-specialists need to make an effort to push back to be included more than we are. The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. We don't care what you do with it." Almost none of my friends have this qualm. I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. 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. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. The reason is -- I love Caltech. As much as I love those people, I should have gone somewhere else and really shocked my system a little bit. I like teaching a lot. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. So, my three years at Santa Barbara, every single year, I thought I'll just get a faculty job this year, and my employability plummeted. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. He was a very senior guy. That's not all of it. The obvious choices were -- the theoretical cosmology effort was mostly split between Fermilab and the astronomy department at Chicago, less so in the physics department. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. 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.
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