"It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. Let's just take the risk, and if they don't work out they won't get tenure." The tenure decision is very different than the hiring decision. So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. I'm not making this up. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. 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. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. Yeah, it absolutely is great. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. But, I mean, I have no shortage of papers I want to write in theoretical physics. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. But most of us didn't think it was real. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. So, I was still sort of judging where I could possibly go on the basis of what the tuition numbers were, even though, really, those are completely irrelevant. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. They seem unnatural to us. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. . There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. I've got work and it's going well. Sean, to go back to the question in high school about whether or not a Harvard or a Princeton was on your radar, I'm curious, as a junior or a senior at Villanova, given that economically, and even geographically, you were not so far away from where you were as a high schooler, what had changed where now a place like a Harvard would have seemed within reach? He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. 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. And that got some attention also. This is so exciting because you are one of the best interviewers out there, so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. 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. This didn't shut up the theorists. [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. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. Yes, well that's true. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. Or, I could say, "Screw it." Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. 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. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. 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. So, I used it for my own purposes. Now, the academic titles. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. More than just valid. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. 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. I got books -- I liked reading. It moved away. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. 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. 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. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. 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, taste matters. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. That's fine. Like, I did it. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. 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? Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. And the answer is, to most people, there is. 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. [53][third-party source needed]. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. I love writing books so much. 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. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. Don't have "a bad year.". 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. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. 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. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. We used Wald, and it was tough. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . That leads to what's called the Big Rip. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. That includes me. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. So, we made a bet. Sorry about that. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. Ten of those men and no women were successful. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. It was fine. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. No one does that. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. That's just not my thing. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. That doesn't work. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. And my response to them is what we do, those of us who are interested in the deepest questions about the nature of reality, whether they're physicists, or philosophers, or whoever, like I said before, we're not going to cure cancer. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. We knew he's going pass." 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. These were all live possibilities. So, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then a few looking forward. No, not really. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. I don't want that left out of the historical record. 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. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. The four of us wrote a paper. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. I get that all the time. Sean Carroll. A nontrivial fraction of tenure-track faculty are denied tenure, well over the standard 5% threshold for Type I errors that we use in the sciences. So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. 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. You have enough room to get it right. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. 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. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. I'm on a contract. 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. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. I'll be back. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? 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. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. 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? I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. This is a weird list. It was a summer school in Italy. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. But it's worked pretty well for me. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. It sounded very believable. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. That was great, a great experience. You know, I wish I knew. 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 said, "Yeah, don't worry. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. Go longer. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. Graduate school is a different thing. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. 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. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? That's the job. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. He explains the factors that led to his undergraduate education at Villanova, and his graduate work at Harvard, where he specialized in astronomy under the direction of George Field. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. But maybe it could. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? Playing the game, writing the papers that got highly cited, being in the mainstream, and doing things that everyone agreed were interesting, which I did to a certain extent but not all the way when I was in Chicago. I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. What are we going to do? For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. But within the course of a week -- coincidence problem -- Vikram Duvvuri, who was a graduate student in Chicago, knocked on my door, and said, "Has anyone ever thought of taking R and adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity and seeing what would happen?" One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. I took almost all the physics classes. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. I really leaned into that. George and Terry team-taught a course on early universe cosmology using the new book by Kolb and [Michael] Turner that had just come out, because Terry was Rocky Kolb's graduate student at Chicago. 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. It's my personal choice. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm really quite excited about this. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. 1 Physics Ellipse 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. 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. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. This is an example of it. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. @seanmcarroll . He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be.

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