The statement added, "This failure is especially . You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. 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 . Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. I did everything right. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. So, like I said, I really love topology. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. Or, maybe I visited there, but just sort of unofficially. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. 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. 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. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. Based on my experience as an Instructor at a major research university and now tenure-track faculty at a major public university, I would say that all of his major points are . 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. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. 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. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. The reason is -- I love Caltech. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". You really, really need scientists or scholars who care enough about academia to help organize it, and help it work, and start centers and institutes, and blaze new trails for departments. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. And I love it when they're interested in outreach or activism or whatever, but I say, "Look, if you want to do that as a professional physicist, you've got to prioritize getting a job as a professional physicist." Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. 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. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. 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. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. Theorists never get this job. So, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. This is a weird list. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. Or, I could say, "Screw it." They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. Thank goodness. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. 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. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest 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. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. 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. Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. Not to mention, socialization. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. Where are the equations I can solve? He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. You have enough room to get it right. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. I did always have an interest in -- I don't want to use the word outreach because that sort of has formal connotations, but in reaching out. I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." That's not by itself bad. They were all graduate students at the time. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? 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. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. 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. And my response to them is what we do, those of us who are interested in the deepest questions about the nature of reality, whether they're physicists, or philosophers, or whoever, like I said before, we're not going to cure cancer. I can do it, and it is fun. 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. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. Now, next year, I'll get a job. I've got work and it's going well. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. 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. I've done it. I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure. You get different answers from different people. By reputation only. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, because he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. We don't understand economics or politics. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. You've been around the block a few times. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. These are all very, very hard questions. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. There were hints of it. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. 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. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" That's a romance, that's not a reality. As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. So, they keep things at a certain level. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. 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. That was my talk. It will never be the largest. We knew he's going pass." You get one quarter off from teaching every year. I have a lot of graduate students. We should move into that era." People still do it. Maybe going back to Plato. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. You know when someone wants to ask a question. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. I've forgotten almost all of it, so I'm not sure it was the best use of my time. So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. 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?" I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." No preparation needed from me. Because you've been at it long enough now, what have been some of the most efficacious strategies that you've found to join those two difficulties? I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. 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. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." So, they said, "Here's what we'll do. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. No, you're completely correct. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that.
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