So, here's another funny story. Another bad planning on my part. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. So, they keep things at a certain level. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. All of them had the same idea, that the amount of matter in the universe acts as a break on the expansion rate of the universe. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. I think, both, actually. This is a weird list. A derivative is the slope of something. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. So, that would happen. Happy to be breathing the air. One, drive research forward. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? It was true that as you looked at larger and larger scales in the universe, you saw more and more matter, not just on an absolute scale, but also relative to what you needed to see. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. You have the equation. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. 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? So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? There's a few, but it's a small number. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Hopefully it'll work out. This happens quite often. Let every student carve out a path of study. Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. So, I said, "Yes, I proposed a book and your wife rejected it.". I taught what was called a big picture course. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. Someone said it. Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? George and Terry team-taught a course on early universe cosmology using the new book by Kolb and [Michael] Turner that had just come out, because Terry was Rocky Kolb's graduate student at Chicago. Young universities ditch the tenure system. But part of the utopia that we don't live in, that I would like to live in, would be people who are trying to make intellectual contributions [should] be judged on the contributions and less on the format in which they were presented. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. [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]. It was a big hit to. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. Sean Payton denies report of concerns with unnamed member of Broncos But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. I was a theorist. He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. 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. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. Why Are Professors Denied Tenure? - YouTube I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. I'm close enough. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? So, thank you so much. But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. 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. Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. 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. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. There's no delay on the line. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. And in the meantime, Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and others, came up with this idea of phantom energy, which had w less than minus one. What are the odds? Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. She could pinpoint it there. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. There was no internet back then. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. Spread the word. College Park, MD 20740 No, no, I kind of like it here. You were starting to do that. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. 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. Measure all the matter in the universe. Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc But those kind of big picture things, which there are little experiments here and there. Maybe that's not fair. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? w of zero means it's like ordinary matter. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. "What major research universities care about is research. But, I mean, I have no shortage of papers I want to write in theoretical physics. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. I think it's more that people don't care. Yes, well that's true. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. The whole bit. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. Well, Harvard -- the astronomy department, which was part and parcel of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- so, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory joined together in the 1970s to form this big institution, which I still think might be the largest collection of astronomy PhDs, in the United States, anyway. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. I had the best thesis committee ever. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. I did various things. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. So, I think it's a big difference. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics?

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