Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. The world has changed a lot. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. It's still pretty young. I've gotten good at it. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. I think all three of those things are valid and important. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. 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. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. So, I was behind already. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. 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. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. I think so. So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. That's what really makes me feel successful. One, drive research forward. You get dangerous. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. That's the job. He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. I had no interest. He was a very senior guy. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. And I said, "But I did do that." God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. . I taught what was called a big picture course. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? Then, I'm happy to admit, if someone says, "Oh, you have to do a podcast interview," it's like, ah, I don't want to do this now. We're kind of out of that. The COBE satellite that was launched on a pretty shoestring budget at the time, and eventually found the CMB anisotropies, that was the second most complicated thing NASA had ever put in orbit after the Hubble space telescope. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. Young people. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. So, it's incredibly liberating because I don't have to keep up with the billion other papers that people are writing in the hot topics. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. 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. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. Like, that's a huge thing. Playing the game, writing the papers that got highly cited, being in the mainstream, and doing things that everyone agreed were interesting, which I did to a certain extent but not all the way when I was in Chicago. 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. That's a romance, that's not a reality. Also, they were all really busy and tired. 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. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" David, my pleasure. 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. We had problem sets that we graded. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. So, there was the physics department, and the astronomy department, and there was also what's called the Enrico Fermi Institute, which was a research institute, but it was like half of the physics department and half of the astronomy department was in it. 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. The production quality was very bad, and the green screen didn't work very well. 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. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. 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. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. What was your thesis research on? So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. Not just that there are different approaches. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. This is an example of it. The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. How do you understand all of these things? So, I think it's a big difference. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. I was ten years old. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 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. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. Graduate school is a different thing. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. We've already established that. They seem unnatural to us. An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. People still do it. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? Not especially, no. But it doesn't hurt. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. I have zero interest in whether someone is doing a hot topic thing for a faculty hire, exactly like you said. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. There are evil people out there. Let's start with the research first. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. Melville, NY 11747 They're a little bit less intimidated. But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. That was my first choice. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . 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. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. Yes. Move on with it. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. It moved away. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? We'll figure it out. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. You're old. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. Thanks very much. The tuition was right. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. I'm very happy with that. More than just valid. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. 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. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? But other people have various ways of getting to the . So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. 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. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. It is remarkable. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. 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. They're not in the job of making me feel good. 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. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. [37] I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. So, I think it can't be overemphasized the extent to which the hard detailed work of theoretical physics is done with pencil and paper, and equations, and pictures, little drawings and so forth, but the ideas come from hanging out with people. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. I'm just thrilled we were able to do this. Who did you work with? I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. That's not all of it. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. What can I write down? This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. I had never heard of him before. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. The reason is -- I love Caltech. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. Maybe not. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. 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. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? Literally, my office mate, while I was in graduate school, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating universe -- not while he was in graduate school, but later. Really, really great guy. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. Let's put it that way. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. I put an "s" on both of them. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. 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? 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. Not a 100% expectation. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. Sean Carroll. 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 . To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. What was your thought process along those lines? My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. There are so many, and it's very easy for me to admit that I suffer from confirmation biases, but it's very hard for me to tell you which ones they are, because we all each individually think that we are perfectly well-calibrating ourselves against our biases, otherwise we would change them in some way. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. I like the idea of debate. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. 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. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. 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. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. Three, tell people about it. The thing that people are looking for, the experimental effort these days, and for very good reason, is aimed at things that we think are plausibly true. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after.