Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. 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? To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. Who knows? I will get water while you're doing that. 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. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. They do not teach either. 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. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. 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 . We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. The original typescript is available. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? 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. Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. Some people are just crackpots. It was a tough decision, but I made it. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. There's still fundamental questions. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. Planning, not my forte. At Los Alamos, yes. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. Then, I'm happy to admit, if someone says, "Oh, you have to do a podcast interview," it's like, ah, I don't want to do this now. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. I was a good teacher. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. And I didn't. That's the job. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. Certainly, no one academic in my family. No, no. Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. So, that's what he would do. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. The rest of the field needs to care. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. 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. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. I think that is part of it. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. Yeah, so actually, I should back up a little bit, because like I said, at Harvard, there were no string theorists. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. It's difficult, yes. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. A video of the debate can be seen here. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? It was hard to figure out what the options were. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. Everyone knew that was real. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. But they're really doing things that are physics. 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. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. We've already established that. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. Then, you enter graduate school as more or less a fully formed person, and you learn to do science. So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Benefits of tenure. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. Let every student carve out a path of study. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". Because they pay for your tuition. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" . You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. A derivative is the slope of something. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. I will confess the error of my ways. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. If I could get a million people buy my books, I'd be a really best-selling author. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. How do you understand all of these things? Maybe going back to Plato. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. I'll be back. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. Well, how would you know? Don't have "a bad year.". They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. I've gotten good at it. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. 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. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. Absolutely the same person.". And I wasn't working on either one of those. [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. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. 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? I took the early universe [class] from Alan. It's not just trendiness. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." So, he was an enormous help to me, but it's not like there were twenty other people who were doing the same kind of thing, and you hang out and have lunch and go to parties and talk about Feynman diagrams. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. So, even though the specialists should always be the majority, we non-specialists need to make an effort to push back to be included more than we are. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. These are all very, very hard questions. I remember, on the one hand, I did it and I sat down thinking it was really bad and I didn't do very well. Martin White. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. "The University of Georgia has been . So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. That would be great. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? The whole bit. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter.