And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. So, let's get off the tenure thing. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. 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. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? 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. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. These were people who were at my level. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. [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. But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. 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. I was there. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. I put an "s" on both of them. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. 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. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. 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. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. We don't know the theory of everything. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. 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. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? And I answered it. And I said, "Yeah, sure." Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? Fast forward to 2011. It was a very casual procedure. No one does that. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. We hit it off immediately. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. I was still thought to be a desirable property. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. I think all three of those things are valid and important. That's it. 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. Advertising on podcasts is really effective compared to TV or radio or webpages. Well, how would you know? I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. So, the technology is always there. 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. I really leaned into that. It's a messy thing. There's a few, but it's a small number. Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. You mean generally across the faculty. We could discover what the dark matter is. 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?" 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. I had the best thesis committee ever. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. I think there are plenty of physicists. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. I've forgotten almost all of it, so I'm not sure it was the best use of my time. 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 . 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. They have a certain way of doing things. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. They are clearly different in some sense. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. 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. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. So, that would happen. I do a lot of outreach, but if you look closely at what I do, it's all trying to generate new ideas and make arguments. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. Another bad planning on my part. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. 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. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. 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. You should not let w be less than minus one." I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. Now, the KITP. So, I think it can't be overemphasized the extent to which the hard detailed work of theoretical physics is done with pencil and paper, and equations, and pictures, little drawings and so forth, but the ideas come from hanging out with people. Okay. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. I did not succeed in that goal. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. The unions were anathema. So, I said, well, how do you do that? [20] In 2014, he was awarded the Andrew Gemant Award by the American Institute of Physics for "significant contributions to the cultural, artistic or humanistic dimension of physics". 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. Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. What are we going to do? You don't really need to do much for those. I think, to some extent, yes. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? You were starting to do that. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. Six months is a very short period of time. 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. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. A video of the debate can be seen here. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. They just don't care. I wrote a big review article about it. 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. This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? Let's put it that way. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. 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. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . Yes. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. That's what I am. Physics does give you that. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. She could pinpoint it there. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist.