I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. That's all it is. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. Was that the game plan from day one for you? I love people who are just so passionate about their little specialty. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. It's not what I want to do. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. Should I explain what that is, or should we assume that people know what that means? But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? Not necessarily because they were all bookish. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. Reply Insider . I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. (2020) A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.Princeton University Press. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. 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 . Some of them are excellent, but it's almost by accident that they appear to be excellent. I think, now, as wonderful as Villanova was, and I can rhapsodize about what a great experience I had there, but it's nothing like going to a major, top notch university, again, just because of the other students who are around you. Six months is a very short period of time. 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?" By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. So, that was with other graduate students. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. I really wanted to move that forward. 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. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? 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. I will get water while you're doing that. Another paper, another paper, another paper. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. Get on with your life. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. I was there. Again, I had great people at MIT. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? 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 . It falls short of that goal in some other ways. 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. They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. It would be bad. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. Some of them might be. 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. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. 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. Sean Carroll. But most of us didn't think it was real. In retrospect, there's two big things. 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. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. But it doesn't hurt. Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. My teacher, who was a wonderful guy, thinks about it a second and goes, "Did you ever think about how really hard it is to teach people things?" It doesn't always work. 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 . That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. And it's not just me. So, all of those things. Where are the equations I can solve? So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. I think it's bad in the following way. 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. Not especially, no. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. 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. No, no. 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. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. It was very small. 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. 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. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. That was my talk. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. That was always temporary. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? Maybe not. We're creeping up on it. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. And I wasn't working on either one of those. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. This didn't shut up the theorists. We don't understand economics or politics. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. Sean, as a public intellectual with your primary identity being a scientist but with tremendous facility in the humanities and philosophy and thinking about politics, in the humanities -- there's a lot of understanding of schools of thought, of intellectual tradition, that is not nearly as prominent as it is in the sciences. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. Because they pay for your tuition. On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. Why is that? I mean, I could do it. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. That's the job. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. You're not going to get tenure. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. I love that, and they love my paper. When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. This is something that's respectable.". There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. Well, Harvard -- the astronomy department, which was part and parcel of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- so, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory joined together in the 1970s to form this big institution, which I still think might be the largest collection of astronomy PhDs, in the United States, anyway. Some field needs to care. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. Wildly enthusiastic reception. So, taste matters. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. 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. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" 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. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. @seanmcarroll . They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. Sean Carroll on free will. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. That's a tough thing to do. So, here's another funny story. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. Honestly, I still think the really good book about the accelerating universe has yet to be written. You should apply." Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. 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. I had never quite -- maybe even today, I have still not quite appreciated how important bringing in grant money is to academia. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them.

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