There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. At Los Alamos, yes. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. I'll just put them on the internet. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . There's always exceptions to that. 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. 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. But that's okay. Like, several of them. So, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered 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? And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. She never went to college. 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. I also started a new course, general relativity for undergraduates, which had not been taught before, and they loved it. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". 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 would be great. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. Wildly enthusiastic reception. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. That's why I said, "To first approximation." Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. But there were postdocs. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is Or, I could say, "Screw it." Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. Let me ask you that question specifically on the topic of religion. Sean on Twitter: "Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at - reddit And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. So, we wrote a paper. So, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. 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. Maybe that's not fair. Amy Bishop and the Trauma of Tenure Denial | Psychology Today It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. 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. It was very small. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. Or other things. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? That's one of the things that I wanted to do. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. It wasn't really clear. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? I can just do what I want. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. I get that all the time. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. Abdoulaye Doucoure came close to leaving Everton under Frank Lampard We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. 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. 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. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. There were two that were especially good. 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. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Powerful people from all over the place go there. No sensible person doubted they would happen. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. We made a new prediction for the microwave background, which was very interesting. They're not in the job of making me feel good. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. Be prolific and reliable. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. There's no delay on the line. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. 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. Sorry about that. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. You have the equation. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. 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 think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. But you're good at math. Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. That's it. Sean, we've brought the narrative right up to the present, so much so that we know exactly what you should be working on right now. The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. Moving-tenure-denial - Chemical & Engineering News 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. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. I just drifted away very, very gradually. 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. Look at the dynamics of the universe and figure out how much matter there must be in there and compare that to what you would guess the amount of matter should be. [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. 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." So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. I like teaching a lot. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. So, every person who came, [every] graduate student, was assigned an advisor, a faculty member, to just sort of guide them through their early years. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. Some people are just crackpots. I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. Another bad planning on my part. Part of my finally, at last, successful attempt to be more serious on the philosophical side of things, I'm writing a bunch of invited papers for philosophy-edited volumes. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." That's when I have the most fun. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. 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. No preparation needed from me. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. 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. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. We had problem sets that we graded. So, I'm a big believer in the disciplines, but it would be at least fun to experiment with the idea of a university that just hired really good people. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. 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.
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