Careplus Health Plans Appeal Filing Limit, Jujutsu Kaisen Death List, Articles W

Young people. 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. I took the early universe [class] from Alan. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. 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. 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. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. All of which is to say, once I got to Caltech, I did start working in broadening myself, but it was slow, and it wasn't my job. I'll just put them on the internet. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. I'll be back. 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. That's the opposite. I love writing books so much. What to do if you're facing tenure denial | Small Pond Science It doesn't always work. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. 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. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. Yeah, I think that's right. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. So, an obvious question arises. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. 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? The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. It was -- I don't know. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. 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. But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. So, they keep things at a certain level. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. So, if, five or ten years from now, the sort of things that excite me do not include cutting edge theoretical physics, then so be it. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. They come in different varieties. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? Ten of those men and no women were successful. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. 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. 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. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. Powerful people from all over the place go there. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. That's the case I tried to make. It's not a good or a bad kind. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. 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. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. You don't get paid for doing it. Maybe that's not fair. So, they knew everything that I had done. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. So, I think it's a big difference. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . What Is a Tenured Employee? Benefits of Earning This Status Otherwise, the obligations are the same. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. In a podcast in 2018, Sam Harris engaged with Carroll. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. We just knew we couldn't afford it. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? This is the advice I tell my students. Some people are just crackpots. But you were. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. 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. That's what supervenience means. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. Author admin Reading 4 min Views 5 Published by 2022. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. Cole. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. This is something that's respectable.". So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. Then you've come to the right place. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. 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. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. Happy to be breathing the air. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. The tuition was right. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. And I answered it. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. 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? It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. We made a new prediction for the microwave background, which was very interesting. That's absolutely true. Yes, but it's not a very big one. What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? They are clearly different in some sense. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. It's not good time management, but we did it and we enjoyed it. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. She could pinpoint it there. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up.