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?" Author admin Reading 4 min Views 5 Published by 2022. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. Yeah, it absolutely is great. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. Later on, I wrote another paper that sort of got me my faculty jobs that pointed out that dark energy could have exactly the same effect. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. I have zero interest in whether someone is doing a hot topic thing for a faculty hire, exactly like you said. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? [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. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. He explains the factors that led to his undergraduate education at Villanova, and his graduate work at Harvard, where he specialized in astronomy under the direction of George Field. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." Like, okay, this is a lot of money. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. Okay? It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. That's why I said, "To first approximation." Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. What could I do? It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? Everything is going great. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. 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. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. It had gotten a little stuck. I haven't given it up yet. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. I like the idea of debate. 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). First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. Be prolific and reliable. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. . So, I recognize that. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. 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. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. Since I wrote Like, that's a huge thing. Very, very important. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. Yeah. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. 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. His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. The reason is -- I love Caltech. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. : Saturday 22 March 2014 2:30:00 am", "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine", "Sean Carroll Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship", "Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast Sean Carroll", "Sean Carroll Bridges Spacetime between Science, Hollywood and the Public | American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Meet the professor who helped put the science into Avengers: Endgame", "Sean Carroll the physicist who taught the Avengers all about time", "Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel", "Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time", "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang", "Science and Religion Can't Be Reconciled: Why I won't take money from the Templeton Foundation", "Science & God: Will Biology, Astronomy, Physics Rule Out Existence Of Deity? Moving on after tenure denial. I was taking Fortran. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. 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. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. 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. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? I was ten years old. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? A nontrivial fraction of tenure-track faculty are denied tenure, well over the standard 5% threshold for Type I errors that we use in the sciences. But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. This is an example of it. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? So, that was a benefit. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. 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. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. 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. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. 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. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. 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. It wasn't really clear. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. This is December 1997. There are numerical variables and character variables. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? Or other things. At Los Alamos, yes. 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? And he said, "Yes, sure." Learn new things about the world. They're not in the job of making me feel good. You don't really need to do much for those. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. It's the path to achieving tenure. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. 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. Hopefully it'll work out. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. Like, crazily successful. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. So, George was randomly assigned to me. Measure all the matter in the universe. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? So, I think it's a big difference. George and Terry team-taught a course on early universe cosmology using the new book by Kolb and [Michael] Turner that had just come out, because Terry was Rocky Kolb's graduate student at Chicago. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. At the end of the five-year term, they ask all the Packard fellows to come to the meeting and give little talks on what they did. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. The thing that people are looking for, the experimental effort these days, and for very good reason, is aimed at things that we think are plausibly true. We're kind of out of that. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" This is what I do. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. Now, the academic titles. I think to first approximation, no. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. So, I was behind already. 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. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? Actually, your suspicion is on-point. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. 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. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. Thanks very much. 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. Did you connect with your father later in life? Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. That's the message I received many, many times. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. I don't always succeed. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. Some people are just crackpots. And I wasn't working on either one of those. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. 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. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. I love that, and they love my paper. Carroll, S.B. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. And guess what? I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. It sounded very believable. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. We certainly never worked together. It was very small. Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. But I did learn something. At Harvard, it's the opposite. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. Again, stuff that has not been that useful to me, but I just loved it so much, as well as philosophy and literature classes at Harvard. I'm just thrilled we were able to do this. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. So, I was done in 20 minutes. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. They were all graduate students at the time. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. 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. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. Faculty are used to disappointment. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? We're creeping up on it. Absolutely. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. Remember, I applied there to go to undergraduate school there. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. That's what really makes me feel successful. You can't get a non-tenured job. So, we wrote a paper. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. 1 Physics Ellipse So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. 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. But you were. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that.
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