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There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. But this is a huge metaphysical assumption that underlies this debate and divides us. Oh, kinds of physics. I pretend that they're separate. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. Now, the academic titles. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. I really wanted to move that forward. 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. He explains the factors that led to his undergraduate education at Villanova, and his graduate work at Harvard, where he specialized in astronomy under the direction of George Field. Having said that, they're still really annoying. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. The production quality was very bad, and the green screen didn't work very well. Oh, yeah. That includes me. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. In some extent, it didn't. So, again, I foolishly said yes. The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. That's right. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. 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. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. Carroll, S.B. I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. Sean Carroll on Twitter For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. 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 . Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. I'm enough of a particle physicist. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. He wrote wonderful popular books. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. 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. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. But it was kind of overwhelming. 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. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. But that's okay. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. @seanmcarroll . There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. It's not a good or a bad kind. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. 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. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. I get that all the time. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. We just knew we couldn't afford it. I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. I don't always succeed. Happy to be breathing the air. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. They decide to do physics for a living. Everyone knows about that. Tenure denials - The Philosophers' Cocoon The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. I don't know. His recent posting on the matter (at . That's all it is. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. They're not in the job of making me feel good. Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . Is it the perfect situation? I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. So, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. I think, to some extent, yes. I'll just put them on the internet. Let's get back to Villanova. I'm just thrilled we were able to do this. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. They reach very different audiences, and they have very different impacts. 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. What could I do? He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. I chose wrongly again. You should not let w be less than minus one." But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. 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? So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. We wrote a lot of papers together. Carroll, S.B. No, you're completely correct. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". They didn't know. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . Sean Carroll. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. 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. So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. That's fine. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism.