Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. 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. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. Princeton University Press. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. [37] The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. I had an astronomy degree, and I'd hung out with cosmologists, so I knew the buzzwords and everything, but I hadn't read the latest papers. But part of the utopia that we don't live in, that I would like to live in, would be people who are trying to make intellectual contributions [should] be judged on the contributions and less on the format in which they were presented. I think both grandfathers worked for U.S. Steel. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. 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. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? He invited a few of us. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. I wrote a big review article about it. No, not really. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. So, and it's good to be positive about the great things about science and academia and so forth, but then you can be blindsided. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. And I knew that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. People didn't take him seriously. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? I was a theorist. That was always temporary. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. They're not in the job of making me feel good. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. Like, crazily successful. Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. So, I kind of talked with my friends. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. 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'm not an expert in that, honestly. 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. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. It's an honor. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. 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 have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. You can't get a non-tenured job. It has not. 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. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. Let's get back to Villanova. What could I do? I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. It's not a good or a bad kind. I had this email from a woman who said, literally, when she was 12 years old, she was at some event, and she was there with her parents, and they happened to sit next to me at a table, and we talked about particle physics, and she wrote just after she got accepted to the PhD program at Oxford in particle physics, and she said it all started with that conversation. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. So, that was a benefit. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. But this is a huge metaphysical assumption that underlies this debate and divides us. So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. 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. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." It would have been better for me. And now I know it. What are the odds? It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. 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. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? [54] In this public dialogue, they discussed the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." You have enough room to get it right. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. So, that was with other graduate students. Having said that, the slight footnote is you open yourself up, if you are a physicist who talks about other things, to people saying, "Stick to physics." I've gotten good at it. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. 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. So, there was the physics department, and the astronomy department, and there was also what's called the Enrico Fermi Institute, which was a research institute, but it was like half of the physics department and half of the astronomy department was in it. They didn't know. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. George didn't know the stuff. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. You should apply." So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. 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. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? There's always exceptions to that. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. 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. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? 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. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. It's still pretty young. That was my talk. Stephen Morrow is his name. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? So, George was randomly assigned to me. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. Let's sit and think about this seriously." So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. 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 . Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. I think all three of those things are valid and important. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . Very, very important. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. I've done it. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. 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. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. The statement added, "This failure is especially . That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. I really leaned into that. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. I had the results. Maybe that's not fair. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. There's no delay on the line. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. Oh, yeah. 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 . It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. As much as I love those people, I should have gone somewhere else and really shocked my system a little bit. 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. All of them had the same idea, that the amount of matter in the universe acts as a break on the expansion rate of the universe. I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." There was no internet back then. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. You know, students are very different. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. It was -- I don't know. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. So, that's one important implication. Why don't people think that way? That's a different me. Martin White. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? Absolutely. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. 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.

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