[24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. I didn't do what I wanted to do. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. 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. Do you have any good plans for a book?" There were hints of it. In a sense, I hope not. You can challenge them if that seems right. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. Let's face it, quantum mechanics, gravitation, cosmology, these are fields that need a lot of help. 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. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. There's still fundamental questions. This happens quite often. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. Planning, not my forte. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. So, like I said, we were for a long time in observational astronomy trying to understand how much stuff there is in the universe, how much matter there is. I got books -- I liked reading. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. Like, that's a huge thing. 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. Martin White. Yeah, absolutely. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. And it's not just me. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. There's a lot of inertia. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. And it was great. No preparation needed from me. That's what supervenience means. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. Let's start with the research first. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. So, I recognize that. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? There are things the rest of the world is interested in. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. 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. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Since I wrote Then why are you wasting my time? 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. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" In fact, the short shield solution, the solution that you get in general relativity for spherically symmetric matter distribution, is exactly the same in this new theory as it was in general relativity. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. 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 . Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. But there's an enormous influence put on your view of reality by all of these pre-existing propositions that you think are probably true. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. 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. And at least a year passed. It's funny that you mention law school. That's a huge effect on people's lives. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. 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. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Get on with your life. By reputation only. This didn't shut up the theorists. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. I think that is part of it. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. This is something that's respectable.". We've already established that. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. Tell us a bit about your new book . He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. So, the paper that I wrote is called The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes. Supervenience is this idea in philosophy that one level depends on another level in a certain way and supervenes on the lower level. 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. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. 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? I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? Physicists have devised a dozen or two . The dynamo, the Biermann battery, the inverse cascade, magnetic helicity, plasma effects, all of these things that are kind of hard for my purely theoretical physicist heart to really wrap my mind around. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. It's an honor. This is probably 2000. [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. 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. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. There was no internet back then. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. 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. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? I'm close enough. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. There's always some institutional resistance. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. (The same years I was battling, several very capable people I had known in grad school at Berkeley were also denied tenure, possibly caught in the cutbacks at the time, possibly victims of a wave . There are evil people out there. 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. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. They're not exactly the same activity, but they're part of the same landscape. Now, the KITP. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. I think to first approximation, no. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. That's my question. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. 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. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. Move on with it. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. That was always true. This is the advice I tell my students. I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. The discovery was announced in July. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. That's a very hard question. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. I'm curious if your more recent interests in politics are directly a reflection of what we've seen in science and public policy with regard to the pandemic. I just don't want to do that anymore. But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. So, they keep things at a certain level. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." I was less good of a fit there. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. I had the results. It's not a good or a bad kind. You're old. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? Yeah, it absolutely is great. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. She never went to college. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. 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. The specific way in which that manifests itself is that when you try to work, or dabble, if you want to put it that way, in different areas, and there are people at your institution who are experts in those specific areas, they're going to judge you in comparison with the best people in your field, in whatever area you just wrote in. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. This is what I do. It was not a very strict Catholic school. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. And I didn't. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. Then, the other big one was, again, I think the constant lesson as I'm saying all these words out loud is how bad my judgment has been about guiding my own academic career. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. 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 played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. They were all graduate students at the time. That's okay. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. 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. It's the path to achieving tenure. 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? It's a necessary thing but the current state of theoretical physicists is guessing. I just think they're wrong. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. [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. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. My response to him was, "No thanks." But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. I put an "s" on both of them. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. 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. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. I'm very happy with that. Now, next year, I'll get a job. Or other things. He was a blessing, helping me out. Not so they could do it. [53][third-party source needed]. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. You can be surprised. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. 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). Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. I had it. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Another paper, another paper, another paper. 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. I didn't really want to live there. Yes, well that's true. The two advantages I can think of are, number one, at that time, it's a very specific time, late '80s, early '90s -- specific in the sense that both particle physics and astronomy were in a lull. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door.