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. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. Is it the perfect situation? You don't get paid for doing it. 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. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. I don't want that left out of the historical record. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? There's an equation you can point to. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. 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 . You know the answer to that." And I didn't. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. It's the path to achieving tenure. The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion", published in September 2022.[15]. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. We don't know what to do with this." But, I mean, I have no shortage of papers I want to write in theoretical physics. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . 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. These are all very, very hard questions. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. Carroll, S.B. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. 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. And I said, "Yeah, sure." But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. Yeah, I think that's right. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. "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. I have zero interest in whether someone is doing a hot topic thing for a faculty hire, exactly like you said. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. That's all it is. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. And we started talking, and it was great. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. I taught what was called a big picture course. You really have to make a case. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. I wonder, Sean, if there's the germinating idea that would inform your interests in outreach, and in doing public science and things like that, it was that inclination that was bounded in an academic context, that you would take eventually into the world of YouTube, and hundreds of thousands of lay people out there, who are learning quantum gravity as a result of you. They do not teach either. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. : Saturday 22 March 2014 2:30:00 am", "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine", "Sean Carroll Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship", "Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast Sean Carroll", "Sean Carroll Bridges Spacetime between Science, Hollywood and the Public | American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Meet the professor who helped put the science into Avengers: Endgame", "Sean Carroll the physicist who taught the Avengers all about time", "Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel", "Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time", "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang", "Science and Religion Can't Be Reconciled: Why I won't take money from the Templeton Foundation", "Science & God: Will Biology, Astronomy, Physics Rule Out Existence Of Deity? So, the technology is always there. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. Another paper, another paper, another paper. So, they knew everything that I had done. Absolutely. Like, I did it. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. So, we made a bet. It's just really, really hard." There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. 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. So, again, I'm going to -- Zoom, etc., podcasts are great. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. Like, ugh. You don't really need to do much for those. But it doesn't hurt. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. You're just too old for that. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. This happens quite often. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." I love it. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. They reach very different audiences, and they have very different impacts. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. That's my question. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people.