So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. Get on with your life. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. No, not really. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". [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. You don't get paid for doing it. I went on expeditions with the dinosaur hunters as a public outreach thing. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. Mark Hoffman was his name. Why is that? I was a theorist. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. 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. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. But that's okay. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. That just didn't happen. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. 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. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . But there were postdocs. : 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? That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . People know who you are. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. You're old. Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. 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. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. We'll measure it." So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? You're looking under the lamppost. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. It's my personal choice. But the idea that there's any connection with what we do as professional scientists and these bigger questions about the nature of reality is just not one that modern physicists have. My response to him was, "No thanks." I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. 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. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. Sean Carroll on free will. But it was kind of overwhelming. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. Tell us a bit about your new book . Well, that's not an experimental discovery. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. It was a summer school in Italy. So, I was still sort of judging where I could possibly go on the basis of what the tuition numbers were, even though, really, those are completely irrelevant. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. George didn't know the stuff. Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. 4. 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. Sean Carroll Family. I don't know how public knowledge this is. Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. But you're good at math. But most of us didn't think it was real. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. One, drive research forward. They come in different varieties. So, even though the specialists should always be the majority, we non-specialists need to make an effort to push back to be included more than we are. You can be surprised. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. And you mean not just in physics. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. She's very, very good. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. Faculty are used to disappointment. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. That's not by itself bad. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. So, that was one big thing. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. 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. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. They just don't care. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. That's a tough thing to do. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. People had learned things, but it was very slow. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. 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. Sean Carroll: I'm not in a super firm position, cause I don't have tenure at Caltech, so, but I don't care either. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. The two advantages I can think of are, number one, at that time, it's a very specific time, late '80s, early '90s -- specific in the sense that both particle physics and astronomy were in a lull. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. I think that is part of it. It was fine. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. 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. No, not really. 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. There was no internet back then. What could I do? But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. ", "Is God a good theory? So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. We wrote a lot of papers together. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. Field. He was a blessing, helping me out. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. In many ways, it was a great book. So, I was on the ground floor in terms of what the observational people. So, that was with other graduate students. 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. 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. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. Some people are just crackpots. I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. 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. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. My teacher, who was a wonderful guy, thinks about it a second and goes, "Did you ever think about how really hard it is to teach people things?" So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. And at least a year passed. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. And they said, "Sure!" Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. So, that was a benefit. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I think it's gone by now. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. The actual job requirements -- a big part of it, the part that I take most seriously, and care most about -- is advising graduate students. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. 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. 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. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. 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. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. Onondaga County. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. Carroll, S.B. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? But maybe it's not, and I don't care. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. 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. 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.