[56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. 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, I was on the ground floor in terms of what the observational people. They're rare. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. It sounded very believable. 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. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. I do a lot of outreach, but if you look closely at what I do, it's all trying to generate new ideas and make arguments. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. I took the early universe [class] from Alan. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. Is there something wrong about it?" And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? I love that, and they love my paper. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? I just think they're wrong. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. 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. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. but academe is treacherous. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. It was -- I don't know. Huge excitement because of this paper. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. [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". That's what really makes me feel successful. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . It's my personal choice. Like, crazily successful. ", "Is God a good theory? I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. I was taking Fortran. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. Then you've come to the right place. . As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. That's not by itself bad. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. 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. We should move into that era." Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. I really wanted to move that forward. I won't say a know-it-all attitude, because I don't necessarily think I knew it all, but I did think that I knew what was best for myself. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. It might have been by K.C. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. We had problem sets that we graded. 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. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. They were very bad at first. [53][third-party source needed]. So, they keep things at a certain level. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. A stylistic clash, I imagine. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. It was July 4th. Okay. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. 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? Do you go to the economics department or the history department? What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. We knew he's going pass." Well, that's interesting. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. Planning, not my forte. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. I've done it. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? 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. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. I was there. I got a lot of books on astronomy. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. He offered 13 pieces of . I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. No, no. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. 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. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. I'm enough of a particle physicist. I really do think that in some sense, the amount that a human being is formed and shaped, as a human being, not as a scientist, is greater when they're an undergraduate than when they're a graduate. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. I think it's more that people don't care. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. But it doesn't hurt. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? Onondaga County. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. It's a necessary thing but the current state of theoretical physicists is guessing. He is a man of above-average stature. She's very, very good. So, that's what he would do. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. 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. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. You can't get a non-tenured job. So, in that sense, technology just hasn't had a lot to say because we haven't been making a lot of discoveries, so we don't need to worry about that.
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