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The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. More than one. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. 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? +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road 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. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Sean Carroll Height. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. I think, both, actually. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. There were hints of it. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. In a sense, I hope not. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. But maybe it could. There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. I lucked into it, once again. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. This is December 1997. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. This is literally the words that I was told. It doesn't always work. Thank goodness. There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. Absolutely brilliant course. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. This is the advice I tell my students. Was that the game plan from day one for you? So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. 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? Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. At the end of the five-year term, they ask all the Packard fellows to come to the meeting and give little talks on what they did. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. Not especially, no. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. 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. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. That's a very hard question. 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. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. Sean Carroll: I'm not in a super firm position, cause I don't have tenure at Caltech, so, but I don't care either. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. 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. So, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then a few looking forward. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. That's not all of it. I've gotten good at it. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. Yeah, no, good. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. You should not let w be less than minus one." Yeah, I think that's right. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. [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. 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.