So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. 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? The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. Having said that, they're still really annoying. But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. Yes, but it's not a very big one. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online. I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. The world has changed a lot. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. It was very small. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. Thank you for inviting me on. I don't think it has anything to do with what's more important, or fundamental, or exciting, or better science, but there is a certain kind of discipline that you learn in learning physics, and a certain bag of tricks and intellectual guiding stars that you pick up that are very, very helpful. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. 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. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. College Park, MD 20740 Well, how would you know? Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? 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. Some people are just crackpots. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? And guess what? It's funny that you mention law school. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. Right. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. / Miscellany. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. That's not by itself bad. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. That's right. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. You were starting to do that. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. So, here's another funny story. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. 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. You get dangerous. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. But then, the thing is, I did. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. 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? But maybe it's not, and I don't care. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? I'm not going to really worry about it. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. [20] In 2014, he was awarded the Andrew Gemant Award by the American Institute of Physics for "significant contributions to the cultural, artistic or humanistic dimension of physics". 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. Benefits of tenure. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. We wrote a lot of papers together. Absolutely. This is a non-tenured position. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. So, I think it's a big difference. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." And they said, "Sure!" I think it's gone by now. You don't really need to do much for those. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. The original typescript is available. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. Very, very much. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. Carroll, S.B. 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. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. Remember, I applied there to go to undergraduate school there. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. 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? It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. 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. 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. 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. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. I get that all the time. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. Washington was just a delight. I have no problems with that. I think it's part of a continuum. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. Institute for Theoretical Physics. You know the answer to that." This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. 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. They are . I do firmly believe that. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things.

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