When there are scores of principals leaving, positions staying open for years and talented new hires being denied tenure, it is a sign of a power vacuum (or disinterest) at the top. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. 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. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. What you should do is, if you're a new faculty member in a department, within the first month of being there, you should have had coffee or lunch with every faculty member. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. Well, that's interesting. 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? Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. The specific way in which that manifests itself is that when you try to work, or dabble, if you want to put it that way, in different areas, and there are people at your institution who are experts in those specific areas, they're going to judge you in comparison with the best people in your field, in whatever area you just wrote in. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. They're not in the job of making me feel good. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. 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. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. Oral History Interviews | Sean Carroll | American Institute of Physics Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. At the time, . Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. 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. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. I didn't stress about that. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. And that's the only thing you do. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. I just think they're wrong. 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. But, you know, my standard is what is it that excites me at the moment? Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. That's all it is. 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. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. 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. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. They're like, what is a theory? 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. [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. But I did learn something. And who knows, it all worked out okay, but this sort of background, floating, invisible knowledge is really, really important, and was never there for me. Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? 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. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. Then you've come to the right place. They reach very different audiences, and they have very different impacts. I think it's bad in the following way. Maybe it's them. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. Yeah, it absolutely is great. The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. 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. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. 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. Yeah, no, good. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. I think we only collaborated on two 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. Do you have any good plans for a book?" 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. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. I think, both, actually. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. Princeton University Press. Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it - Nature Again, I was wrong. I didn't do what I wanted to do. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? I don't interact with it that strongly personally. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? I did not succeed in that goal. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. That's the case I tried to make. I think that is part of it. 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. Be prolific and reliable. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. So, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. And he said, "Absolutely. I think to first approximation, no. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. You're not going to get tenure. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. We just knew we couldn't afford it. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. Let's put it that way. I really wanted to move that forward. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. So, I think it's a big difference. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. 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. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. That was always true. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? This is literally the words that I was told. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. 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. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. So, we wrote a paper. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. ", "Is God a good theory? Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. Sean, to go back to the question in high school about whether or not a Harvard or a Princeton was on your radar, I'm curious, as a junior or a senior at Villanova, given that economically, and even geographically, you were not so far away from where you were as a high schooler, what had changed where now a place like a Harvard would have seemed within reach? Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? So, that was true in high school. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? I was less good of a fit there. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. No, no. So, I did, and they became very popular. Now, look, if I'm being objective, maybe this dramatically decreases my chances of having a paper that makes a big impact, because I'm not writing papers that other people are already focused on.
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