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. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. 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 do this over and over again. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? 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 you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. This is what I do. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. Let's sit and think about this seriously." I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. 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. If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Being on the debate team, trying to work through different attitudes, back and forth. 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? 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. [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. 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. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. 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. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. This is something that's respectable.". There were people who absolutely had thought about it. To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. There's a lot of inertia. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. I can do it, and it is fun. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. 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. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. These were all live possibilities. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. I went on expeditions with the dinosaur hunters as a public outreach thing. 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. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. 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. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. 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. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. But there definitely has been a shift. A lot of people focus on the fact that he was so good at reaching out to broad audiences, in an almost unprecedented way, that they forget that he was really a profound thinker as well. Someone like me, for example, who is very much a physicist, but also is interested in philosophy, and I would like to be more active even than I am at philosophy at the official level, writing papers and things like that. I do try my best to be objective. 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. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. There's always exceptions to that. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . We'll figure it out. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I just want to say. I think it's bad in the following way. Also, assistant professor, right? The argument I make in the paper is if you are a physicalist, if you exclude by assumption the possibility of non-physical stuff -- that's a separate argument, but first let's be physicalists -- then, we know the laws of physics governing the stuff out of which we are made at the quantum field theory level. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. Faculty are used to disappointment. 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 . We wrote a lot of papers together. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. It's still pretty young. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. No, not really. I've gotten good at it. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. Sean Carroll. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. People didn't take him seriously. Is there something wrong about it?" For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." So, they said, "Here's what we'll do. And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that. By reputation only. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. So, I wrote very short chapters. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? 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. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. . Let's put it that way. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. At the time, . I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. Did you connect with your father later in life? I literally got it yesterday on the internet. I mean, I could do it. Suite 110 I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. Some of them might be. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. But I'm classified as a physicist. But I don't know what started it. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. 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. I did various things. And you mean not just in physics. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . I was a good teacher. I don't know how public knowledge this is. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. I think, they're businesspeople. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? Absolutely. I think, both, actually. Benefits of tenure. It was a big hit to. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. Okay. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. She's very, very good. Powerful people from all over the place go there. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. 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? 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. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. Some field needs to care. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. 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. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. I'm not going to really worry about it. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. I got a lot of books on astronomy. 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. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. But I did learn something. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. 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? Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. We certainly never worked together. What could I do? Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. I'll never be Joe Rogan or Marc Maron, or whatever. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. Let's go back to the happier place of science. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? Mark Hoffman was his name. So, I'm really quite excited about this. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. 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 think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. Let's get back to Villanova. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. 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. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. 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. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. So, George was randomly assigned to me. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. What about minus 1.1? They are . 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. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. So the bad news is. So, in that sense, technology just hasn't had a lot to say because we haven't been making a lot of discoveries, so we don't need to worry about that. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. Who was on your thesis committee? because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. You're not going to get tenure. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. [37] First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. 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. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? That's the job. We'll measure it." 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. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? You can read any one of them on a subway ride. They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. No, not really. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. I thought I knew what I was doing. Not to mention, socialization. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. So, I said, well, how do you do that? That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. The unions were anathema. And I knew that. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. No preparation needed from me. It's just really, really hard." In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. That's the message I received many, many times. Let's just say that. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. Just get to know people. College Park, MD 20740 I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. Wildly enthusiastic reception. His article "Does the Universe Need God?" But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. It was hard to figure out what the options were. I took almost all the physics classes. Let's put it that way. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense.
