I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. That's my question. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. It wasn't really clear. He was a blessing, helping me out. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. Or, maybe I visited there, but just sort of unofficially. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. You're old. Moving on after tenure denial. And he's like, "Sure." I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. 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. 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 think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. That includes me. Faculty are used to disappointment. 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." Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). We don't know what to do with this." Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. 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. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" So, a lot of the reasons why my path has been sort of zig-zaggy and back and forth is because -- I guess, the two reasons are: number one, I didn't have great sources of advice, and number two, I wasn't very good at taking the advice when I got it. 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? It would have been better for me. 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. That would be great. ", "Is God a good theory? [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. 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. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . I'll just put them on the internet. That's not by itself bad. 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. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. Right. Social media, Instagram. 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. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. This is December 1997. 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. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. So, again, I'm going to -- Zoom, etc., podcasts are great. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. That's a tough thing to do. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. So, I'm really quite excited about this. [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. So, we talked about different possibilities. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. So, my other graduate school colleagues, Brian had gone to the University of Arizona, Ian Dell'Antonio, who was another friend of mine, went to, I think, Haverford. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." There's no other input that you have. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. Reply Insider . What could I do? It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. I will confess the error of my ways. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. It's still pretty young. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. Chicago is a little bit in between. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". Absolutely. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. I'm not sure how much time passed. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. That's just the system. They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. 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. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. 4. Now, can I promise you that the benefit is worth the cost, and I wouldn't actually be better off just sitting down and spending all of my time thinking about that one thing? So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. 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. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. Some of them might be. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that.