And at least a year passed. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . I really leaned into that. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. I took almost all the physics classes. Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." 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. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. 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. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. It is remarkable. 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. 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. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. 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 love that, and they love my paper. 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? So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. But there were postdocs. 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. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. Two and a half years I've been doing it, and just like with the videos, my style and my presentation has been improving, I hope, over time. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. So, George was randomly assigned to me. You can't get a non-tenured job. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. ", "Is God a good theory? So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. She could pinpoint it there. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. Look at the dynamics of the universe and figure out how much matter there must be in there and compare that to what you would guess the amount of matter should be. We'll have to see. Where are the equations I can solve? I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. I'm enough of a particle physicist. Sean Carroll - Chief Procurement Officer - NYS Office of General So, that was definitely an option. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? But they're going to give me money, and who cares? But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? I was really surprised." People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. That would be great. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. What? Cosmologist Sean Carroll doesn't freak out when Darwin is doubted Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. Sorry about that. By reputation only. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. 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." I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. What were the most interesting topics at that time? Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? Okay. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. I will get water while you're doing that. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. What mattered was learning the material. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. So, my other graduate school colleagues, Brian had gone to the University of Arizona, Ian Dell'Antonio, who was another friend of mine, went to, I think, Haverford. 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." The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. You don't get paid for doing it. This is December 1997. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. The unhappy result of preferring less candor is the loss we all feel now.". What's so great about right now? tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. He was a blessing, helping me out. ", "Making Sense Podcast #124 In Search of Reality", "Alan Wallace and Sean Carroll on The Nature of Reality", "Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll, and Laura Mersini-Hougton debate the Big Bang and Creation Myths", "Episode 28: Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe Sean Carroll", "Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books", Oral history interview transcript with Sean Carroll on 4 January 2021, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, Video introduction to Sean Carroll's lectures "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sean_M._Carroll&oldid=1141102312. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. They have a certain way of doing things. You know, I wish I knew. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. 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? But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. Some field needs to care. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. I remember that. You're not going to get tenure. Cole. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. I think, they're businesspeople. Dutton, $29. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. It was very small. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? Too Much Information? - Inside Higher Ed 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. So, here's another funny story. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is You know, there's a lot we don't understand. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. Russell Wilson denies he wanted Pete Carroll and John Schneider fired There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." So, I did, and they became very popular. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. 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. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. And I knew that. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. Who did you work with? I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? 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. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it - Nature The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? 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? Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. They seem unnatural to us. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . 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. The South Pole telescope is his baby. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. That's a romance, that's not a reality. 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? I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. That's the job. That was always true. 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. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. And you mean not just in physics. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. Now, the academic titles. 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. Not to mention, socialization. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. What can I write down? But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? Onondaga County. 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. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. Or, I could say, "Screw it." I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. The world has changed a lot. These are all very, very hard questions. So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. College Park, MD 20740 But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Alright, Sean. Everyone knows about that. No preparation needed from me. Because they pay for your tuition. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. 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. Benefits of tenure. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. That's why I said, "To first approximation." So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. 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. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds.