I had never quite -- maybe even today, I have still not quite appreciated how important bringing in grant money is to academia. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. So, here's another funny story. It just came out of the blue. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. There are so many people at Chicago. I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. We'll measure it." But I'm classified as a physicist. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. The book talks about wide range of topics such as submicroscopic components of the universe, whether human existence can have meaning without Godand everything between the two. So, they keep things at a certain level. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. When there are scores of principals leaving, positions staying open for years and talented new hires being denied tenure, it is a sign of a power vacuum (or disinterest) at the top. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. I'm not discounting me. And they said, "Sure!" I got a lot of books on astronomy. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. Then why are you wasting my time? Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. 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. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. I'm not sure how much time passed. No, no, I kind of like it here. No, you're completely correct. I've forgotten almost all of it, so I'm not sure it was the best use of my time. I think it's gone by now. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. I'm enough of a particle physicist. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. So, that was one big thing. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. Washington was just a delight. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. Carroll, S.B. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. You know, I wish I knew. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. Maybe it's them. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. But part of the utopia that we don't live in, that I would like to live in, would be people who are trying to make intellectual contributions [should] be judged on the contributions and less on the format in which they were presented. Moving on after tenure denial. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. I haven't given it up yet. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . I literally got it yesterday on the internet. So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? What are we going to do? That doesn't work. That's right. We hit it off immediately. We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. It would have been better for me. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. 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. So, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? I will confess the error of my ways. You nerded out entirely. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. 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. Okay. 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. He is a man of above-average stature. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. Tenure denial, seven years later. More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. 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 faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. He wrote wonderful popular books. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. 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. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . The system has benefited them. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. There's this huge gap in between what we give the popular press, where I have to fight for three equations in my book, and a textbook, which is three equations every paragraph. That's the case I tried to make. We certainly never worked together. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. 4. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. I do firmly believe that. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. Let's put it that way. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. 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. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. 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. Sean Carroll. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. I decided to turn them down, mostly because I thought I could do better. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. Literally, my office mate, while I was in graduate school, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating universe -- not while he was in graduate school, but later. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. Part of my finally, at last, successful attempt to be more serious on the philosophical side of things, I'm writing a bunch of invited papers for philosophy-edited volumes. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. This is a non-tenured position. So far so good. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. But you were. In some extent, it didn't. So, that was definitely an option. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" So, my other graduate school colleagues, Brian had gone to the University of Arizona, Ian Dell'Antonio, who was another friend of mine, went to, I think, Haverford. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. So, there's three quarters in an academic year. Theorists never get this job. And now I know it. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. Whereas the accelerated universe was a surprise. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? They actually have gotten some great results. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. But he was very clear. Very, very important. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. Let's start with the research first. 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? Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? I said, "Well, yeah, I did. That's not data. Let's put it that way. I have a lot of graduate students. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. I don't think so. 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. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. 1 Physics Ellipse It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. But it doesn't hurt. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. But that's okay. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. I did everything right. So, he founded that. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. She never went to college. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. 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. 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. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. I think that the vast majority of benefit that students get from their university education is from interacting with other students. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. There are so many, and it's very easy for me to admit that I suffer from confirmation biases, but it's very hard for me to tell you which ones they are, because we all each individually think that we are perfectly well-calibrating ourselves against our biases, otherwise we would change them in some way. It's funny when that happens. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. So, you can think of throwing a ball up into the air, and it goes up, but it goes up ever more slowly, because the Earth's gravitational pull is pulling it down. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely.