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. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." I'm enough of a particle physicist. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. So, I was on the ground floor in terms of what the observational people. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. I'm very happy with that. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? 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. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. 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. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. 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. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? In some extent, it didn't. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . I think, both, actually. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. Melville, NY 11747 So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. 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. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. Some of them might be. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Sean, for my last question, looking forward, I want to reflect on your educational trajectory, and the very uncertain path from graduate school to postdoc, to postdoc to the University of Chicago. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. I think it was like $800 million. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. 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. It's difficult, yes. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. 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. So, George was randomly assigned to me. 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? The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. That's a recognized thing that's going on. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. It's just like being a professor. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. I think it's more that people don't care. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? We had problem sets that we graded. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. 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. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. So, he was an enormous help to me, but it's not like there were twenty other people who were doing the same kind of thing, and you hang out and have lunch and go to parties and talk about Feynman diagrams. 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. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. He was a blessing, helping me out. That's not what I do for a living. That's okay. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. 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. Playing the game, writing the papers that got highly cited, being in the mainstream, and doing things that everyone agreed were interesting, which I did to a certain extent but not all the way when I was in Chicago. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. 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. Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. What about minus 1.1? Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. 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. 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? Okay? 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. They're a little bit less intimidated. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. 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. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." 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. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth But he was very clear. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. It is incredibly draining for me to do it. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . So, we'd already done R plus a constant. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. That's right. 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. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. If you take a calculus class, you learned all these techniques, like the product rule, and what to do with polynomials. Let's put it that way. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. Sean Carroll Family. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. I have a short attention span. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. Would that be on that level? He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. But within the course of a week -- coincidence problem -- Vikram Duvvuri, who was a graduate student in Chicago, knocked on my door, and said, "Has anyone ever thought of taking R and adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity and seeing what would happen?" What was your thought process along those lines? Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? So, most research professors at Caltech are that. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. At Harvard, it's the opposite. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. That's a tough thing to do. All of the ability I have to give talks, and anything like that, has come from working at it. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. How Not to Get Tenure - Outside the Beltway And I wasn't working on either one of those. Okay. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Why Lorgia Garca Pea Was Denied Tenure at Harvard Okay. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. So, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then a few looking forward. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. So, that appeared in my book as a vignette. So, we made a bet. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. [32][33][34] Some of his work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity and the arrow of time. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. That's what really makes me feel successful. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. As I look from a galaxy to a cluster to large-scale structure, it goes up, and it goes up to .3, and it kind of stays at .3, even as I look at larger and larger things. It's my personal choice. A video of the debate can be seen here. Sean Carroll's Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. 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. It was a tough decision, but I made it. Then why are you wasting my time? Huge excitement because of this paper. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. Hopefully it'll work out. Like, that's a huge thing. I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. And it was great. 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. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. You really have to make a case. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. I don't know how public knowledge this is. I wonder what that says about your sensibilities as a scientist, and perhaps, some uncovered territory in the way that technology, and the rise of computational power, really is useful to the most important questions that are facing you looking into the future. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. I like the idea of debate. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. Not necessarily because they were all bookish. Another bad planning on my part. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? Not even jump back into it but keep it up. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. [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]. It's funny that you mention law school. Some field needs to care. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. They actually have gotten some great results. Then you've come to the right place. Who knows? So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. 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? It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. Maybe going back to Plato. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. But I don't remember what it was. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure.

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