I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? So, that was true in high school. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. 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. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. . And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for 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. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. And they said, "Sure!" Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. 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'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. 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? And it was a . At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. I had it. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). You can't get a non-tenured job. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. It doesn't always work. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. I don't always succeed. 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 did everything right. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. 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. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. Sean Carroll on Consciousness, Physicalism, and the History of Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. That's a different me. 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. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. But they're really doing things that are physics. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. So, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. Certainly, no one academic in my family. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. 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. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. That's the opposite. I don't think it has anything to do with what's more important, or fundamental, or exciting, or better science, but there is a certain kind of discipline that you learn in learning physics, and a certain bag of tricks and intellectual guiding stars that you pick up that are very, very helpful. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. Were your family's sensibilities working class or more middle class, would you say? Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com I didn't really want to live there. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. 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. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. 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? www.nysun.com If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. I don't know. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. You got a full scholarship there, of course. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. 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? It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. I think, now, as wonderful as Villanova was, and I can rhapsodize about what a great experience I had there, but it's nothing like going to a major, top notch university, again, just because of the other students who are around you. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . And I didn't. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. Well, that's interesting. There's still fundamental questions. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. Why did Sean Carroll not get tenure? - Steadyprintshop.com One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. 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. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. But it doesn't hurt. Benefits of tenure. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. Let's put it that way. 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? It's not what I want to do. It's not just trendiness. 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. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. Thank you for inviting me on. But I'm classified as a physicist. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. Perhaps, to get back to an earlier comment about some of the things that are problematic about academic faculty positions, as you say, yes, sometimes there is a positive benefit to trends, but on the other hand, when you're establishing yourself for an academic career, that's a career that if all goes well will last for many, many decades where trends come and go. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. And at least a year passed. Yes, but it's not a very big one. Spread the word. Learn new things about the world. 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. There's good physics reasons. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. 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. Reply Insider . Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right?
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