Part of it is what I alluded to earlier. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. I don't want that left out of the historical record. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. So, that was true in high school. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. 1 Physics Ellipse [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? So, they keep things at a certain level. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. 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. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. They are clearly different in some sense. I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. And I didn't. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. 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. But this is a huge metaphysical assumption that underlies this debate and divides us. Let's put it that way. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. 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. It's not just trendiness. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. I did not succeed in that goal. 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. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. This is probably 2000. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. 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. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. 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. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She's very, very good. I took almost all the physics classes. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. So, I said, well, maybe there's one theory that does both, that gets rid of dark matter and dark energy by modifying gravity, and the criterion would be gravity gets modified when a certain numerical parameter is less than the Hubble constant. Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. I really leaned into that. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. Whereas the accelerated universe was a surprise. But then, the thing is, I did. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. So, I realized right from the start, I would not be able to do it at all if I assume that the audience didn't understand anything about equations, if I was not allowed to use equations. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? You really have to make a case. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Go longer. Yeah, it absolutely is great. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. 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. It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. 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. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. What are we going to do? Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . I think it's gone by now. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. 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. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? Don't have "a bad year.". Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. Why don't people think that way? I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. You know when someone wants to ask a question. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. That's my question. There's a lot of inertia. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." My response to him was, "No thanks." They were very bad at first. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. 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! But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. 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. I took the early universe [class] from Alan. It was a big hit to. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. This is real physics. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. Faculty are used to disappointment. The world has changed a lot. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. 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. By the way, all these are hard. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. [53][third-party source needed]. That's how philosophy goes. So, I'm a big believer in the disciplines, but it would be at least fun to experiment with the idea of a university that just hired really good people. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. But those kind of big picture things, which there are little experiments here and there. In fact, the short shield solution, the solution that you get in general relativity for spherically symmetric matter distribution, is exactly the same in this new theory as it was in general relativity. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. Like, crazily successful. His recent posting on the matter (at . Now, look, if I'm being objective, maybe this dramatically decreases my chances of having a paper that makes a big impact, because I'm not writing papers that other people are already focused on. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . It's not good time management, but we did it and we enjoyed it. I'm not sure how much time passed. Just get to know people.
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