Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. I also started a new course, general relativity for undergraduates, which had not been taught before, and they loved it. 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. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." Sean, to go back to the question in high school about whether or not a Harvard or a Princeton was on your radar, I'm curious, as a junior or a senior at Villanova, given that economically, and even geographically, you were not so far away from where you were as a high schooler, what had changed where now a place like a Harvard would have seemed within reach? The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. 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. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. Carroll, S.B. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. 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. They seem unnatural to us. The thing that people are looking for, the experimental effort these days, and for very good reason, is aimed at things that we think are plausibly true. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. Or a biochemist, right? Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. / Miscellany. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. 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. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? I was still thought to be a desirable property. Thank you for inviting me on. It was -- I don't know. People know who you are. That was my first choice. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. So, the technology is always there. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. My mom was tickled. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Let's put it that way. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. That one and a follow up to that. 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. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. So, that's what he would do. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. And at least a year passed. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. They were all graduate students at the time. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. Some field needs to care. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? But I don't know what started it. I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. They're a little bit less intimidated. . Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. That's right. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. That just didn't happen. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. 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. 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. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. 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? In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. Hopefully it'll work out. You get dangerous. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . They come in different varieties. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. I took almost all the physics classes. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. I don't know how public knowledge this is. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. So, I was done in 20 minutes. I do firmly believe that. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. The discovery was announced in July. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. And I've guessed. That's absolutely true. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. We had problem sets that we graded. I think people like me should have an easier time. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. Let every student carve out a path of study. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. At Los Alamos, yes. I got books -- I liked reading. So, he was an enormous help to me, but it's not like there were twenty other people who were doing the same kind of thing, and you hang out and have lunch and go to parties and talk about Feynman diagrams. Like, several of them. Now, next year, I'll get a job. Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. So, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. I wonder if in some ways you're truly old fashioned in the way that what we would call scientists today, in the 17th and 18th century, they called natural philosophers. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. Is it the perfect situation? There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. I'm on a contract. He offered 13 pieces of . The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. And now I know it. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. And it was great. It would be bad. It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . 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. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. We might have met at a cosmology conference. They didn't know. Who hasn't written one, really? It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Let's just take the risk, and if they don't work out they won't get tenure." The tenure decision is very different than the hiring decision. 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. I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. I don't know. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. Institute for Theoretical Physics. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Yeah, it absolutely is great. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. They do not teach either. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. Absolutely. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. Thanks very much. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. I remember -- who was I talking to? No, I cannot in good conscience do that. So, they had clearly not talked to each other. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. So, I said, well, how do you do that? Sean Carroll: I'm not in a super firm position, cause I don't have tenure at Caltech, so, but I don't care either. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. Since I wrote But there's plenty of smart people working on that. So, that was true in high school. Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? Just get to know people. 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. So, you can think of throwing a ball up into the air, and it goes up, but it goes up ever more slowly, because the Earth's gravitational pull is pulling it down. They saw the writing on the wall. You've been around the block a few times. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. So, I realized right from the start, I would not be able to do it at all if I assume that the audience didn't understand anything about equations, if I was not allowed to use equations. 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. The rest of the field needs to care. I did various things. 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. So, it was really just a great place. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Like, crazily successful. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? 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. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. 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. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. I think we only collaborated on two papers. And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. He was a blessing, helping me out. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? Yeah, so actually, I should back up a little bit, because like I said, at Harvard, there were no string theorists. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. 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. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. I think, both, actually. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. 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. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. They're not in the job of making me feel good. So, taste matters. Not especially, no. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. And I said, "But I did do that." Actually, your suspicion is on-point. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. Very, very important. You know when someone wants to ask a question. The reason is -- I love Caltech. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. It's a messy thing. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. Some of them are excellent, but it's almost by accident that they appear to be excellent. If you actually take a scientific attitude toward the promotion of science, you can study what kinds of things work, and what kinds of approaches are most effective. A video of the debate can be seen here. You should apply." I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for.

Albany Zaftig Parchment Sectional Sofa, When Was Ronald Williams Born, Articles W