I think that is part of it. Having said that, they're still really annoying. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. 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? Dutton, $29. Get on with your life. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. People still do it. 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. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. It wasn't really clear. I got a lot of books on astronomy. 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. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. 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. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. They're like, what is a theory? 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? Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . 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? I've gotten good at it. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. This happens quite often. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. 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. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. Completely blindsided. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. I do try my best to be objective. Euclid's laws work pretty well. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. That's not what I do for a living. And we started talking, and it was great. 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. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. Came up with a good idea. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. 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's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. I love writing books so much. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. Let's face it, quantum mechanics, gravitation, cosmology, these are fields that need a lot of help. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. So, I'm really quite excited about this. The four of us wrote a paper. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. You know the answer to that." So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. That was my talk. It just came out of the blue. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." That's the job. Now, the KITP. Graduate school is a different thing. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. Planning, not my forte. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. Six months is a very short period of time. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? What was George Field's style like as a mentor? But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. [37] And I didn't. So, let's get off the tenure thing. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. Yes. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. Again, I had great people at MIT. You got a full scholarship there, of course. It might have been by K.C. I think, to some extent, yes. 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. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. 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. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. This is literally the words that I was told. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. [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. 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. I'm not sure. I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. That's fine. They basically admitted that. Should we let w be less than minus one?" Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. I'm very happy with that. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. Sean Carroll. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. I think, both, actually. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. but academe is treacherous. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. 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. That's right. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. I said, "Well, yeah, I did. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. You're just too old for that.
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