You should apply." Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. I'm not going to really worry about it. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. We knew he's going pass." They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? Yeah, no, good. "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. They didn't know. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. It was a big hit to. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. This is literally the words that I was told. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. That's how philosophy goes. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. In retrospect, there's two big things. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." Someone said it. Reply Insider . But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. 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. 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. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. It's funny that you mention law school. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. Like, crazily successful. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. They reach very different audiences, and they have very different impacts. The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. I really leaned into that. That was always temporary. I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. There's nobody working on using insights from the foundation of quantum mechanics to help understand quantum gravity, or at least, very, very few people. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. So, I'm a big believer in the disciplines, but it would be at least fun to experiment with the idea of a university that just hired really good people. Came up with a good idea. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. I think there are plenty of physicists. In some extent, it didn't. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. That's okay. I was in Sidney's office all the time. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. But then, the thing is, I did. Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. It's just really, really hard." It was a huge success. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. But I loved it. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. Learn new things about the world. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. Now, the KITP. Graduate school is a different thing. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. It was hard to figure out what the options were. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. Fast forward to 2011. 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 . So, again, I sort of brushed it off. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. I didn't stress about that. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. No, no, I kind of like it here. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. What mattered was learning the material. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. They are . I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. And part of it was because no one told me. In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. And I wasn't working on either one of those. Certainly, no one academic in my family. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. I love writing books so much. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. I don't always succeed. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. As I look from a galaxy to a cluster to large-scale structure, it goes up, and it goes up to .3, and it kind of stays at .3, even as I look at larger and larger things. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. 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. The whole bit. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. These are all very, very hard questions. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. 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. What was your thought process along those lines? 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. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. 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. It was a tough decision, but I made it. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . 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. I wrote a big review article about it. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. Honestly, I still think the really good book about the accelerating universe has yet to be written.
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