The original typescript is available. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. Well, one ramification of that is technological. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? Yeah. But he was very clear. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. That's my question. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. There are evil people out there. We might have met at a cosmology conference. 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 did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." There are numerical variables and character variables. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. Just get to know people. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. You know, students are very different. Why do people get denied tenure? With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. But other people have various ways of getting to the . Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. 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. That's the message I received many, many times. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. Again, I had great people at MIT. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. So, I want to do something else. They are . Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? 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? But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. But it doesn't hurt. It moved away. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? At the time, . Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. The tuition was right. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. Stephen Morrow is his name. But I don't remember what it was. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. [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. Some people are just crackpots. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. So, thank you so much. Completely blindsided. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. Recent Books. Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. Okay. I won't say a know-it-all attitude, because I don't necessarily think I knew it all, but I did think that I knew what was best for myself. Again, I was wrong over and over again. 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. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. What are the odds? I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. It's not overturning all of physics. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. 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? Yes, but it's not a very big one. Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. I taught what was called a big picture course. Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. I'm not discounting me. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Young universities ditch the tenure system. 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. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. There's still fundamental questions. And that's not bad or cynical. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. I'm enough of a particle physicist. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. It is January 4th, 2021. They were very bad at first. 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. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. These are all very, very hard questions. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. So, again, I foolishly said yes. The Hubble constant is famously related to the dark energy, because it's the current value of the Hubble constant where dark energy is just taking over. I'm close enough. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. Happy to be breathing the air. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. I think it's bad in the following way. So, they knew everything that I had done. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. 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 just did the next step that I was supposed to do. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. In a sense, I hope not. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. So, that's what he would do. I've forgotten almost all of it, so I'm not sure it was the best use of my time. It sounded very believable. It was a huge success. It's still pretty young. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. Very, very important. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. 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? I don't know how public knowledge this is. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. So, we talked about different possibilities. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. No, no. That's a tough thing to do. I was in Sidney's office all the time. Euclid's laws work pretty well. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. Let's put it that way. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. 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. 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. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. I think, to some extent, yes. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. 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. 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. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. My mom was tickled. College Park, MD 20740 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. Having said that, they're still really annoying. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. I made that choice consciously. It is remarkable. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. 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. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." What mattered was learning the material. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. 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. I was ten years old. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? Suite 110 We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. 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. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Because they pay for your tuition. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. 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. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. That's a romance, that's not a reality. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. 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. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. It's a messy thing. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. So, they keep things at a certain level. At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. 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. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. But those kind of big picture things, which there are little experiments here and there. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. I'm on a contract. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. It's just like being a professor. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. On Carroll's view the universe begins to exist at the Big Bang only in the sense that a yardstick begins to exist at the first inch. This could be great. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013.