All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. "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. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. 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. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. My response to him was, "No thanks." Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. No one does that. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. People had learned things, but it was very slow. And it was a . Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. You have enough room to get it right. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. 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 they're really doing things that are physics. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. I think it's more that people don't care. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. Not especially, no. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" I will confess the error of my ways. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. Absolutely the same person.". Carroll, S.B. Measure all the matter in the universe. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. Again, I had great people at MIT. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. We don't care what you do with it." We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. 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. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. But it doesn't hurt. 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. 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. 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. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. Absolutely. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. 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. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. Completely blindsided. His recent posting on the matter (at . It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. You're looking under the lamppost. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. But, you know, my standard is what is it that excites me at the moment? This happens quite often. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. That's the message I received many, many times. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. 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. Sean Carroll. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. And I've guessed. But I'm classified as a physicist. It seems that when you finally got to Caltech, it all clicked for you. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. 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? So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. Right. I decided to turn them down, mostly because I thought I could do better. Not especially, no. I made that choice consciously. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. 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. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. Sean, as a public intellectual with your primary identity being a scientist but with tremendous facility in the humanities and philosophy and thinking about politics, in the humanities -- there's a lot of understanding of schools of thought, of intellectual tradition, that is not nearly as prominent as it is in the sciences. Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. By reputation only. 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. Well, that's interesting. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. So, George was randomly assigned to me. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. They come in different varieties. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. 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. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. 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. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. I do try my best to be objective. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. His article "Does the Universe Need God?" I thought I knew what I was doing. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. So, that was definitely an option. I took almost all the physics classes. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. A stylistic clash, I imagine. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. He's supposed to answer the questions." Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? So, I want to do something else. I'm very happy with that. It was fine. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. 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. You mean generally across the faculty. 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. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. The argument I make in the paper is if you are a physicalist, if you exclude by assumption the possibility of non-physical stuff -- that's a separate argument, but first let's be physicalists -- then, we know the laws of physics governing the stuff out of which we are made at the quantum field theory level. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. 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. [37] I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? Since I've been ten years old, how about that? What you should do is, if you're a new faculty member in a department, within the first month of being there, you should have had coffee or lunch with every faculty member. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. In retrospect, there's two big things. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. I love writing books so much.
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