In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. I think that the vast majority of benefit that students get from their university education is from interacting with other students. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? That's fine. 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? Not so they could do it. Faculty are used to disappointment. I know the field theory. So, that's how I started working with Alan. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. 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. This happens quite often. Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. I just don't want to do that anymore. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. And he says, "Yes, everything the Santa Fe Institute has ever done counts." It worked for them, and they like it. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is I don't always succeed. That was always true. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. It was a tough decision, but I made it. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. So, an obvious question arises. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. People didn't take him seriously. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. 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. 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. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. But it doesn't hurt. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. Abdoulaye Doucoure came close to leaving Everton under Frank Lampard Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. What could I do? No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." 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. Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. They are . Two and a half years I've been doing it, and just like with the videos, my style and my presentation has been improving, I hope, over time. In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. That's the job. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. 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. And he's like, "Sure." I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. No, no, I kind of like it here. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. I did not succeed in that goal. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. Why Are Professors Denied Tenure? - YouTube It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. They actually have gotten some great results. Now, the KITP. 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. 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, 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. But there were postdocs. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. 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. I'll just put them on the internet. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More That's a recognized thing that's going on. What was your thesis research on? In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. 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. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. I think that's the right way to put it. The specific way in which that manifests itself is that when you try to work, or dabble, if you want to put it that way, in different areas, and there are people at your institution who are experts in those specific areas, they're going to judge you in comparison with the best people in your field, in whatever area you just wrote in. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met.
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