"The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. Thanks very much. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. So, we made a bet. But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. I'm close enough. The University of Chicago Magazine I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. And it's not just me. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . Why tenure is so important yet rare for Black professors So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. So, that was with other graduate students. If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. 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. We had problem sets that we graded. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. Princeton University Press. Should we let w be less than minus one?" Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. So, I said, well, how do you do that? Sorry about that. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. Suite 110 Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure? - Chicago Tribune I think we only collaborated on two papers. So, that's how I started working with Alan. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. I think, both, actually. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. But I don't remember what it was. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. Measure all the matter in the universe. College Park, MD 20740 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. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. 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. 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. 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? We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. 4. It's not just trendiness. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. That's when I have the most fun. There are so many people at Chicago. Why don't people think that way? They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. So the bad news is - Sean Carroll So many ideas I want to get on paper. I like teaching a lot. 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. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. 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. And part of it was because no one told me. Oh, yeah. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. Fast forward to 2011. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? No, quite the opposite. We're creeping up on it. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. I mean, I could do it. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. There's still fundamental questions. Were your family's sensibilities working class or more middle class, would you say? You don't get paid for doing it. That's not all of it. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. I know the field theory. 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. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. Sean Carroll Family. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. 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. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. 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. And who knows, it all worked out okay, but this sort of background, floating, invisible knowledge is really, really important, and was never there for me. The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com He wrote wonderful popular books. 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. More than one. That was always true. Maybe that's not fair. Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. I got the Packard Fellowship. We're kind of out of that. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. 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." That's all it is. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. So, I did, and they became very popular. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. 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, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. I had no interest. I'll just put them on the internet. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. So, an obvious question arises. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . Very, very much. There's an equation you can point to. It's funny that you mention law school. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. And that's not bad or cynical. There's nobody working on using insights from the foundation of quantum mechanics to help understand quantum gravity, or at least, very, very few people. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. 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. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. 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 . They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. That's a very hard question. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. I think both grandfathers worked for U.S. Steel. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. 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. 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. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. Maybe going back to Plato. It moved away. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. I got books -- I liked reading. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. Carroll, S.B. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. 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. They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. 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. But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. This is a weird list. Or other things. Well, it's true. So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. Sean Payton addresses Russell Wilson's private office So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. I don't know. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. I did various things. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? 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?" I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Hopefully it'll work out. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. Certainly, no one academic in my family. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. 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. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? 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. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. Some of them might be. On the point of not having quantum field theory as an undergraduate, I wonder, among your cohort, if you felt that you stuck out, like a more working class kid who went to Villanova, and that was very much not the profile of your fellow graduate students. So, that would happen. It's not just a platitude. The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." Having said that, they're still really annoying. 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? I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. Is this where you want to be long-term, or is it possible that an entirely new opportunity could come along that could compel you that maybe this is what you should pursue next? Sean Carroll on Twitter If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. It is remarkable. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. 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. Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. I have a short attention span. Like, that's a huge thing. It was very long. 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. 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. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? 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. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? I don't agree with what they do. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. I had never heard of him before. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." 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. That would be great. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. This didn't shut up the theorists. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. Absolutely brilliant course. 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. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. Sean Carroll. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. It's still pretty young. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. Right. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. You don't really need to do much for those. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. 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. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. I talked about topological defects, and it was good work, solid work, but they were honestly -- and this is the sort of weird thing -- they said, after I gave the talk and everything, "Look, everyone individually likes you, but no one is sure where you belong." I will get water while you're doing that. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it.