But you're good at math. 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. It doesn't always work. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. They basically admitted that. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. These are all very, very hard questions. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . Maybe going back to Plato. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. College Park, MD 20740 I will." And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. I wrote a big review article about it. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. The COBE satellite that was launched on a pretty shoestring budget at the time, and eventually found the CMB anisotropies, that was the second most complicated thing NASA had ever put in orbit after the Hubble space telescope. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. 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. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. We've already established that. But he didn't know me in high school. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. I'll be back. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. By the way, all these are hard. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. It will never be the largest. 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? Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? It's funny when that happens. No, you're completely correct. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. You know, I wish I knew. So, they keep things at a certain level. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. We're not developing a better smart phone. Powerful people from all over the place go there. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. I have no problems with that. There's always exceptions to that. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. You have the equation. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. 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 think I got this wrong once. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. Did you get any question like that? Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. I did everything right. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. "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. 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. I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. Why did you do that?" But I'm classified as a physicist. Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. 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. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. [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. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. 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. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. Carroll has a B.S. I got the Packard Fellowship. I'd like to start first with your parents. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. 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. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? They are . But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. 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. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. So, I went to a large public school. 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. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. I explained, and he said he had read this paper that he thought was interesting, by Richard Gott, on time machines, close time-like curves in gravity.

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