There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. It's just really, really hard." Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? I really leaned into that. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. So, that would happen. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. They're like, what is a theory? They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. The production quality was very bad, and the green screen didn't work very well. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. No, quite the opposite. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? Does Sean Carroll Take Phd Students? - Online Phd Program In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. What should we do? They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. But most of us didn't think it was real. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. (2020) A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.Princeton University Press. 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. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? It doesn't need to be confined to a region. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. Completely blindsided. Would that be on that level? Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. It's at least possible. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. But it's not what I do research on. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. So, that's what he would do. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. . Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. Yeah. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. 1 Physics Ellipse Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. That's the message I received many, many times. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. Sean, we've brought the narrative right up to the present, so much so that we know exactly what you should be working on right now. 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. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. Let's put it that way. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. So, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. 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. So, like I said, we were for a long time in observational astronomy trying to understand how much stuff there is in the universe, how much matter there is. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? I got the Packard Fellowship. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. 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. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. That's a very hard question. And I said, "But I did do that." There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. [54] In this public dialogue, they discussed the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. 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. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. Like, that's a huge thing. 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. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. Huge excitement because of this paper. I wonder if in some ways you're truly old fashioned in the way that what we would call scientists today, in the 17th and 18th century, they called natural philosophers. Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it - Nature 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. Is this where you want to be long-term, or is it possible that an entirely new opportunity could come along that could compel you that maybe this is what you should pursue next? But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. One, drive research forward. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. [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". Yeah. No one told me. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. Well, Harvard -- the astronomy department, which was part and parcel of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- so, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory joined together in the 1970s to form this big institution, which I still think might be the largest collection of astronomy PhDs, in the United States, anyway. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. 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. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. That's just not my thing. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. Moving-tenure-denial - Chemical & Engineering News You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. I went on expeditions with the dinosaur hunters as a public outreach thing. He had to learn it. I do try my best to be objective. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . I thought I knew what I was doing. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. But, you know, my standard is what is it that excites me at the moment? They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. This is something that's respectable.". I do this over and over again. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. It just came out of the blue. Another bad planning on my part. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. Oh, yeah. But this is a huge metaphysical assumption that underlies this debate and divides us. There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. The original typescript is available. But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. 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? You know, I wish I knew. A video of the debate can be seen here. That's when I have the most fun. He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure? - Chicago Tribune That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" I remember that. That's why I said, "To first approximation." Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. Being surrounded by the best people was really, really important to me. On the point of not having quantum field theory as an undergraduate, I wonder, among your cohort, if you felt that you stuck out, like a more working class kid who went to Villanova, and that was very much not the profile of your fellow graduate students. You should apply." It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. It was July 4th. MIT was a weird place in various ways. Reply Insider . You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. 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. I said, "Well, yeah, I did. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. Spread the word. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. Sean Carroll. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. 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. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different.