Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. 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. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. You know, students are very different. It's not just a platitude. Would that be on that level? That's the message I received many, many times. 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. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. But I don't remember what it was. Not to mention, socialization. We knew he's going pass." Yeah, absolutely. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. But there were postdocs. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? There were hints of it. So, George was randomly assigned to me. I had it. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. Then why are you wasting my time? Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. 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. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. Well, it's true. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. So, there's three quarters in an academic year. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. I wrote a big review article about it. 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? Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." 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. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. I get that all the time. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. I do this over and over again. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. You were starting to do that. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. I think people like me should have an easier time. 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. But, you know, the contingencies of history. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. Sean Carroll Height. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. Who knows? Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. Everyone knew that was real. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. 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. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. It was very long. ", "Is God a good theory? The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. Be prolific and reliable. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. 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? By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. 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. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. 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? What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" It gets you a job in a philosophy department. 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. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. I wonder, Sean, if there's the germinating idea that would inform your interests in outreach, and in doing public science and things like that, it was that inclination that was bounded in an academic context, that you would take eventually into the world of YouTube, and hundreds of thousands of lay people out there, who are learning quantum gravity as a result of you. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. 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. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? I think all three of those things are valid and important. I have a short attention span. So the bad news is. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. We don't understand economics or politics. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. I think it's bad in the following way. Let's just say that. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. 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. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. Later on, I wrote another paper that sort of got me my faculty jobs that pointed out that dark energy could have exactly the same effect. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. 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? What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. You mean generally across the faculty. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. You nerded out entirely. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. 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. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. No, you're completely correct. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. A derivative is the slope of something. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. Like, that's a huge thing. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. Here is my thought process. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. 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. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits . Don't have "a bad year.". At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. Huge excitement because of this paper. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. I do a lot of outreach, but if you look closely at what I do, it's all trying to generate new ideas and make arguments. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. Yes. So, again, I foolishly said yes. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. I did not succeed in that goal. You get dangerous. 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. Sean Carroll Family. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. They're a little bit less intimidated. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. No sensible person doubted they would happen. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. On the point of not having quantum field theory as an undergraduate, I wonder, among your cohort, if you felt that you stuck out, like a more working class kid who went to Villanova, and that was very much not the profile of your fellow graduate students. Did you get any question like that? And I wasn't working on either one of those. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). 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. In a podcast in 2018, Sam Harris engaged with Carroll. Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. The tuition was right. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. but academe is treacherous. I mean, I could do it. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. I'm enough of a particle physicist. Again, I had great people at MIT. Again, in my philosophy of pluralism, there should be both kinds. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. Also, they were all really busy and tired. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. But still, it was a very, very exciting time. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. 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 . He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. The original typescript is available. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. I do try my best to be objective. 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. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX, American Association of Physicists in Medicine, AVS: Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. Oh, there aren't any? 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. So, let's get off the tenure thing. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. We don't know the theory of everything. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. You know the answer to that." The statement added, "This failure is especially . And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. 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. 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? 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. But he was very clear. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Happy to be breathing the air. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? No, not really. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question.