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. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. I remember, on the one hand, I did it and I sat down thinking it was really bad and I didn't do very well. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. Then why are you wasting my time? 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. 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. Huge excitement because of this paper. Absolutely brilliant course. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. "The University of Georgia has been . So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. You get different answers from different people. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. 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. So, late 1997, Phil Lubin, who was an astronomy professor at Santa Barbara, organized a workshop at KITP on measuring cosmological parameters with the cosmic microwave background. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. What mattered was learning the material. We could discover what the dark matter is. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. 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. I thought I knew what I was doing. 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." So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. ", "Is God a good theory? Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. He was a blessing, helping me out. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. It was -- I don't know. Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. He had to learn it. So, that would happen. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. 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. 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. They come in different varieties. It's not overturning all of physics. Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. Right. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. Again, stuff that has not been that useful to me, but I just loved it so much, as well as philosophy and literature classes at Harvard. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. Again, I was wrong over and over again. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. This happens quite often. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. I'm not discounting me. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. It's funny when that happens. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. Right. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. She could pinpoint it there. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. That would be great. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. 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. On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. Or there was. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. I had the results. 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. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. What was he working on when you first met him? No preparation needed from me. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. They chew you up and spit you out. It was a big hit to. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. Okay. 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. Benefits of tenure. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. So, that's what he would do. They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects.