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People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. We just knew we couldn't afford it. What you would guess is the universe is expanding, and how fast it's expanding is related to that amount of density of the universe in a very particular way. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. That's why I said, "To first approximation." People still do it. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. It was -- I don't know. We're kind of out of that. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. 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. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. It was hard to figure out what the options were. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. 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." So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. 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. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? But most of us didn't think it was real. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. The obvious choices were -- the theoretical cosmology effort was mostly split between Fermilab and the astronomy department at Chicago, less so in the physics department. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. And he's like, "Sure." I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? It doesn't lead to new technology. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. But it's worked pretty well for me. No sensible person doubted they would happen. Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Who was on your thesis committee? 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. Like, that's a huge thing. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. It's not a good or a bad kind. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. Let's put it that way. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. I remember that. 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. These were all live possibilities. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. That's a romance, that's not a reality. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. People had learned things, but it was very slow. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. And Chicago was somewhere in between. Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. You can't get a non-tenured job. So, I was behind already. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Did you do that self-consciously? I have a lot of graduate students. I was in Sidney's office all the time. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. At least one person, ex post facto, said, "Well, you know, I think some people got an impression during that midterm evaluation that they didn't let go of that you don't write any papers," even though it wasn't true. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. 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. 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? They chew you up and spit you out. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. That's what supervenience means. Yeah. That's not data. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Well, that's interesting. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. 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. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. 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. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff. 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. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. Melville, NY 11747 I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. It's still pretty young. There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. 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. People know who you are. I wrote a big review article about it. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too.