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. Who is E Jean Carroll and why did she file a defamation - The Sun Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. So, it's incredibly liberating because I don't have to keep up with the billion other papers that people are writing in the hot topics. People had learned things, but it was very slow. And you mean not just in physics. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. I had never quite -- maybe even today, I have still not quite appreciated how important bringing in grant money is to academia. 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. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc Russell Wilson Wanted Sean Payton To Replace Pete Carroll With Seahawks? I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. So, I went to a large public school. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? So many ideas I want to get on paper. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? It's not just a platitude. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. People are sitting around with little aperitifs, or whatever, late at night. It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. This is a weird list. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. but academe is treacherous. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. "The University of Georgia has been . Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. Why Lorgia Garca Pea Was Denied Tenure at Harvard But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. 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. 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? So, again, I'm going to -- Zoom, etc., podcasts are great. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. That's absolutely true. By reputation only. Well, how would you know? Mark Hoffman was his name. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. You're looking under the lamppost. Some people love it. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. You have the equation. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. 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. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. 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. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. Or there was. So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. Three, tell people about it. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. 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. 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 . Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. Spread the word. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. Then why are you wasting my time? It's my personal choice. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. Very, very important. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. 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. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. 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? These are all very, very hard questions. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. You were starting to do that. 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 want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. Physics does give you that. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. Someone like me, for example, who is very much a physicist, but also is interested in philosophy, and I would like to be more active even than I am at philosophy at the official level, writing papers and things like that. They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. They reach very different audiences, and they have very different impacts. But maybe it could. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? They come in different varieties. 4. It is remarkable. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Is there something wrong about it?" [37] I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. That's not what I do for a living. Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. 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). A derivative is the slope of something. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. What? Cosmologist Sean Carroll doesn't freak out when Darwin is doubted Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. Melville, NY 11747 Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. So, my three years at Santa Barbara, every single year, I thought I'll just get a faculty job this year, and my employability plummeted. No, you're completely correct. So the bad news is - Sean Carroll I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. 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. 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. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. That's right. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. They saw the writing on the wall. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. 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 had it. 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?" As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. So, thank you so much. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." It would have been better for me. Institute for Theoretical Physics. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. We're creeping up on it. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. 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. That's when I have the most fun. There was, but it was kind of splintered because of this large number of people. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. He offered 13 pieces of . What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. They just don't care. That's just not my thing. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. 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 . I had this email from a woman who said, literally, when she was 12 years old, she was at some event, and she was there with her parents, and they happened to sit next to me at a table, and we talked about particle physics, and she wrote just after she got accepted to the PhD program at Oxford in particle physics, and she said it all started with that conversation. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? You get different answers from different people. Let's get back to Villanova. 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. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. So, I kind of talked with my friends. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. What's so great about right now? I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments.