People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. I think that is part of it. 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, 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. That's what I am. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. He's the best graduate student I've ever had. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. That's the case I tried to make. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . Physicists have devised a dozen or two . So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. 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. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? I just don't want to do that anymore. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. So far so good. 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. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. I just think they're wrong. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. What mattered was learning the material. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. It's the path to achieving tenure. It's all worth it in the end. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. 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. So, I was behind already. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. 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. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. Measure all the matter in the universe. They need it written within six months so it can be published before the discovery is announced. It's an honor. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." Well, how would you know? But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. Like, I did it. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. It would have been better for me. Some people love it. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. We're creeping up on it. I'll just put them on the internet. That was my talk. It seems that when you finally got to Caltech, it all clicked for you. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. What you should do is, if you're a new faculty member in a department, within the first month of being there, you should have had coffee or lunch with every faculty member. I think to first approximation, no. So, that was one big thing. What are we going to do? No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. And that's the only thing you do. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. 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. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. I love writing books so much. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. You know when someone wants to ask a question. I really wanted to move that forward. And he said, "Absolutely. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. Carroll has a B.S. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. And this time, first I had to do it all by myself, but because I was again foolishly ambitious, I typed up all the lecture notes, so equations and everything, before each lecture, Xeroxed them and handed them out. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. It was not a very strict Catholic school. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. 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. It was a very casual procedure. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. 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). As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. He offered 13 pieces of . If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." Having said that, the slight footnote is you open yourself up, if you are a physicist who talks about other things, to people saying, "Stick to physics." Should I explain what that is, or should we assume that people know what that means? For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. You were starting to do that. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. They are . So, we wrote a paper. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. What were the most interesting topics at that time? What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. Maybe not. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. 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. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. The actual job requirements -- a big part of it, the part that I take most seriously, and care most about -- is advising graduate students. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. You have the equation. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. Why is that? They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. You don't really need to do much for those. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. I've never cared. 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. Carroll, S.B. So, again, I foolishly said yes. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. It's still pretty young. 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. You really, really need scientists or scholars who care enough about academia to help organize it, and help it work, and start centers and institutes, and blaze new trails for departments. 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? I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. People are sitting around with little aperitifs, or whatever, late at night. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? What about minus 1.1? And I answered it. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. The statement added, "This failure is especially . Let's put it that way. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. 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? Came up with a good idea. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. I'm enough of a particle physicist. I was really surprised." You're just too old for that. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. 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. That's a huge effect on people's lives. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." My mom was tickled. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." At the time, . 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. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?"
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