So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. I had no interest. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. Planning, not my forte. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. The South Pole telescope is his baby. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. I was ten years old. There are so many, and it's very easy for me to admit that I suffer from confirmation biases, but it's very hard for me to tell you which ones they are, because we all each individually think that we are perfectly well-calibrating ourselves against our biases, otherwise we would change them in some way. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. I will." Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. Let's put it that way. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." They seem unnatural to us. No one does that. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. Field. The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Carroll, S.B. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. 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? I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? And he's like, "Sure." Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. One, drive research forward. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. I'd like to start first with your parents. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. You get different answers from different people. Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. I like her a lot. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. 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. I think so. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. 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. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. I like teaching a lot. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. They're rare. The system has benefited them. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. Let's get back to Villanova. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. I went on expeditions with the dinosaur hunters as a public outreach thing. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. And that got some attention also. That was always true. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. 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 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. That was great, a great experience. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. Let every student carve out a path of study. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. That's when I have the most fun. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Tenure denial, seven years later. I don't think so. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. Not a 100% expectation. Yeah, it absolutely is great. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. Do you have any good plans for a book?" It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. Some field needs to care. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." It's at least possible. Some people love it. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. But other people have various ways of getting to the . So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. It's a junior faculty job. 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. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. 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. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. Again, I was wrong over and over again. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." I don't know. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. So, that was a benefit. I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. We'll measure it." A derivative is the slope of something. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. Well, most people got tenure. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. 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." So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. It worked for them, and they like it. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. Six months is a very short period of time. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Law school was probably my second choice at the time. There's this huge gap in between what we give the popular press, where I have to fight for three equations in my book, and a textbook, which is three equations every paragraph. Yeah, I think that's right. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. Yeah. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. What should we do? And I've guessed. Let's start with the research first. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. I do try my best to be objective. I've got work and it's going well. It was true that as you looked at larger and larger scales in the universe, you saw more and more matter, not just on an absolute scale, but also relative to what you needed to see.