He is a man of above-average stature. It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. 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. Very, very important. I got a lot of books on astronomy. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. It's all worth it in the end. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. 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. Chicago is a little bit in between. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. So, there's just too many people to talk to, really. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. [53][third-party source needed]. 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. College Park, MD 20740 Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. Six months is a very short period of time. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? Young people. It is incredibly draining for me to do it. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? That would be great. 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? His recent posting on the matter (at . Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. There's an equation you can point to. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. I'm not discounting me. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. We certainly never worked together. It worked for them, and they like it. 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. They need it written within six months so it can be published before the discovery is announced. 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. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. Not to mention, socialization. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? Fast forward to 2011. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. There were hints of it. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? You're looking under the lamppost. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. 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. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. 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. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. Is it the perfect situation? It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. 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. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. Advertising on podcasts is really effective compared to TV or radio or webpages. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. Now, you might ask, who cares? When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. But there definitely has been a shift. 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. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. But it was kind of overwhelming. We don't care what you do with it." Who was on your thesis committee? What am I going to do? I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. 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. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. I'll just put them on the internet. At Harvard, it's the opposite. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. I didn't stress about that. But I loved it. Faculty are used to disappointment. 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. So far so good. So, that's how I started working with Alan. That's a romance, that's not a reality. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Well, one ramification of that is technological. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. So, that was one big thing. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. No, not really. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. 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. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. His most-cited work, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due To New Gravitational Physics?" That was always true. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. And now I know it. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . In fact, no one cited it at the time -- people are catching on now -- but it was on the arrow of time in cosmology and why entropy in the universe is smaller in the past than in the future. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. 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. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. It's not just a platitude. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. Oh, yeah. And this time, first I had to do it all by myself, but because I was again foolishly ambitious, I typed up all the lecture notes, so equations and everything, before each lecture, Xeroxed them and handed them out. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas.
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