We'll figure it out. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. I know the field theory. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? What sparked that interest in you? His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. 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. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. And you mean not just in physics. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. I'm on a contract. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. Sorry about that. ", "Making Sense Podcast #124 In Search of Reality", "Alan Wallace and Sean Carroll on The Nature of Reality", "Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll, and Laura Mersini-Hougton debate the Big Bang and Creation Myths", "Episode 28: Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe Sean Carroll", "Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books", Oral history interview transcript with Sean Carroll on 4 January 2021, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, Video introduction to Sean Carroll's lectures "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sean_M._Carroll&oldid=1141102312. I get that all the time. 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? 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. I'm not sure. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. I think I got this wrong once. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. 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. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. Washington was just a delight. I think people like me should have an easier time. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. Who hasn't written one, really? And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? There are things the rest of the world is interested in. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. They actually have gotten some great results. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. 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. 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. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. But then, the thing is, I did. That was great, a great experience. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. It was July 4th. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. 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? It wasn't really clear. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. They come in different varieties. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. I did various things. So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. 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, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. 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 okay. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit. I got the Packard Fellowship. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. 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. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. Maybe it's them. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. I just want to say. You were starting to do that. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. Reply Insider . But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. But it's not what I do research on. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. It's the path to achieving tenure. A lot of people focus on the fact that he was so good at reaching out to broad audiences, in an almost unprecedented way, that they forget that he was really a profound thinker as well. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. 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 mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. Well, most people got tenure. Stephen Morrow is his name. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. Yes. Oh, kinds of physics. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Yeah, no, good. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. 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. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. Benefits of tenure. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. And that got some attention also. Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. I was really surprised." God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. It was a big hit to. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. I like her a lot. This is probably 2000. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . I was taking Fortran. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. 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 . I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? That's the case I tried to make. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret.