I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? 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. Sean Carroll | Department of Biology | University of Maryland Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. That's right. A nontrivial fraction of tenure-track faculty are denied tenure, well over the standard 5% threshold for Type I errors that we use in the sciences. So, they keep things at a certain level. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. You should not let w be less than minus one." This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. No, not really. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. But they're really doing things that are physics. 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. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. It is remarkable. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. 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. That's why I said, "To first approximation." Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. So, if, five or ten years from now, the sort of things that excite me do not include cutting edge theoretical physics, then so be it. I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. You're not going to get tenure. In a podcast in 2018, Sam Harris engaged with Carroll. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. What? Cosmologist Sean Carroll doesn't freak out when Darwin is doubted Do you go to the economics department or the history department? The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. And I said, "But I did do that." But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. That's just not my thing. Tell us a bit about your new book . Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. That's the opposite. It was a very casual procedure. 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. The discovery was announced in July. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. 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. This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. The Hubble constant is famously related to the dark energy, because it's the current value of the Hubble constant where dark energy is just taking over. Being surrounded by the best people was really, really important to me. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. . This didn't shut up the theorists. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. 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. Well, it's true. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. 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. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. So, that's one important implication. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? And that's not bad or cynical. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. The polarization of light from the CMB might be rotated just a little bit as it travels through space. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. But other people have various ways of getting to the . I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. Hopefully it'll work out. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. And at least a year passed. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. 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? So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. 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. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. I don't always succeed. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities.