We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. They do not teach either. But I loved it. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. The argument I make in the paper is if you are a physicalist, if you exclude by assumption the possibility of non-physical stuff -- that's a separate argument, but first let's be physicalists -- then, we know the laws of physics governing the stuff out of which we are made at the quantum field theory level. "What major research universities care about is research. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. . 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. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. That's the case I tried to make. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. I was a theorist. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. Honestly, I still think the really good book about the accelerating universe has yet to be written. It was July 4th. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Reply Insider . When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. Well, it's true. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. They are clearly different in some sense. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. Now, can I promise you that the benefit is worth the cost, and I wouldn't actually be better off just sitting down and spending all of my time thinking about that one thing? And I said, "Yeah, sure." They are . So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? That doesn't work. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. I'm very happy with that. No preparation needed from me. So, I said, well, how do you do that? Carroll was dishonest on two important points. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do 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. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? That's how philosophy goes. Huge excitement because of this paper. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. 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. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. Stephen Knight on Sean Carroll, Colin Wright, and the binary of sex Why Sean Carroll is wrong - Quantum Moxie What are the odds? The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. Like, several of them. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. But I did learn something. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? Like, where's the energy coming from? It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. That's absolutely true. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. You're looking under the lamppost. Young universities ditch the tenure system. . Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. That's just the system. I thought I knew what I was doing. Move on with it. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. So the bad news is - Sean Carroll It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. That's right. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." Princeton University Press. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. It was very small. What are the Different Reasons for Being Denied Tenure? I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? I started blogging in 2004, and I was rejected in 2005 from Chicago. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. You got a full scholarship there, of course. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. So, thank you so much. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. Yeah, I think that's right. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. Like, ugh. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. That's fine. I didn't really want to live there. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. Sean Carroll. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. That was always true. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. And in the meantime, Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and others, came up with this idea of phantom energy, which had w less than minus one. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. . The four of us wrote a paper. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. 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 think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. Everything is going great. It was -- I don't know. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. 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. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. I think it's part of a continuum. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. That's the message I received many, many times. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. Planning, not my forte. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. Maybe it's them. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. So, and it's good to be positive about the great things about science and academia and so forth, but then you can be blindsided. It's difficult, yes. Yeah, absolutely. It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. Some of them might be. So, two things. 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. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. Let's put it that way. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it - Nature So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. They decide to do physics for a living. Sean Carroll on Twitter It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. Some Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. This happens quite often. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. That was my first choice. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora I said, "Yeah, don't worry. He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. I did various things. He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, because he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. In a sense, I hope not. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. The University of Chicago Magazine I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." They come in different varieties. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True 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. 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 have enormous respect for the people who do that. No one told me. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road Since I've been ten years old, how about that? Not especially, no. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. I will." Thank you for inviting me on. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. 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? Carroll, S.B. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" It was a big hit to. Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. A video of the debate can be seen here. All while I was in Santa Barbara. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world.