That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. That's not what I do for a living. ", "Is God a good theory? If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. Who did you work with? Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. 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? Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. They're not in the job of making me feel good. Let every student carve out a path of study. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. Someone said it. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. 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." I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. It would be bad. This is what I do. And I love it when they're interested in outreach or activism or whatever, but I say, "Look, if you want to do that as a professional physicist, you've got to prioritize getting a job as a professional physicist." I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. That's the job. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. In many ways, it was a great book. It will never be the largest. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. I wonder, Sean, if there's the germinating idea that would inform your interests in outreach, and in doing public science and things like that, it was that inclination that was bounded in an academic context, that you would take eventually into the world of YouTube, and hundreds of thousands of lay people out there, who are learning quantum gravity as a result of you. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Ten of those men and no women were successful. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. Or a biochemist, right? We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. @seanmcarroll . She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. Fast forward to 2011. 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. And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion", published in September 2022.[15]. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. You get dangerous. You've been around the block a few times. If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? And I didn't. 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. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. 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? Absolutely brilliant course. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? I'll never be Joe Rogan or Marc Maron, or whatever. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. I don't want to say anything against them. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. 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. I think so. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". 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. 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. So, it was really just a great place. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. You have enough room to get it right. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. What can I write down? Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? 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. 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. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. What was your thesis research on? As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. He was doing intellectual work in the process of public outreach, which is really, really hard, and he was just a master at it as well as being an extremely accomplished planetary scientist, and working with NASA and so forth. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. I think, they're businesspeople. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. We don't know what to do with this." I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Field. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. Should we let w be less than minus one?" [14] He has also published a YouTube video series entitled "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" which provides physics instruction at a popular-science level but with equations and a mathematical basis, rather than mere analogy. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. And Chicago was somewhere in between. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. Happy to be breathing the air. 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. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? When I told Ed Guinan, my undergraduate advisor, that I had George Field as an advisor, he said, "Oh, you got lucky." There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. Carroll, S.B. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. More than just valid. 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. But most of us didn't think it was real. 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. I had never heard of him before. They saw the writing on the wall. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. Who hasn't written one, really? The statement added, "This failure is especially . That was my talk. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. But that's okay. I've got work and it's going well. ", "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 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. 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.
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