Actually, your suspicion is on-point. 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. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. 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. This is a non-tenured position. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. We certainly never worked together. We'll have to see. The whole bit. But it's not what I do research on. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. Sean Carroll Family. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. Sean Carroll. Field. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. 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. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. 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. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. But it doesn't hurt. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." The system has benefited them. People still do it. Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. So, I wrote very short chapters. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. but academe is treacherous. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. I think I got this wrong once. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. 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? In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. But other people have various ways of getting to the . What sparked that interest in you? because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. We might have met at a cosmology conference. But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. But I don't know what started it. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. No one told me. I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. Okay. So, I did, and they became very popular. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. 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. Here is my thought process. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. That's a romance, that's not a reality. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. I had it. Did you connect with your father later in life? Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. But you were. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. No, not really. You're looking under the lamppost. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. 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? Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. Reply Insider . What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. Thank goodness. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. 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? All while I was in Santa Barbara. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. We'll figure it out. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. 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. Chicago is a little bit in between. 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. That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for.
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