Sean Carroll. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. 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? As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. That's it. Oh, kinds of physics. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. It was July 4th. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? The original typescript is available. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. I love writing books so much. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. Chicago is a little bit in between. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. And we started talking, and it was great. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . That's right. 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. 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. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. I think it was like $800 million. My mom was tickled. I can just do what I want. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. Do you have any good plans for a book?" 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 . But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Again, I was wrong over and over again. So, that's how I started working with Alan. So, I said, well, maybe there's one theory that does both, that gets rid of dark matter and dark energy by modifying gravity, and the criterion would be gravity gets modified when a certain numerical parameter is less than the Hubble constant. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God. I think it's more that people don't care. 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. So the bad news is. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. In many ways, it was a great book. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. I'll be back. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. 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. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. Certainly, no one academic in my family. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. 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. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. Who did you work with? That just didn't happen. Washington was just a delight. I had never heard of him before. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. Part of it is what I alluded to earlier. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Yes, well that's true. You got a full scholarship there, of course. A video of the debate can be seen here. If I could get a million people buy my books, I'd be a really best-selling author. 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. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. Let every student carve out a path of study. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. That includes me. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. I was a good teacher. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. So, I kind of talked with my friends. Remember, I applied there to go to undergraduate school there. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. Faculty are used to disappointment. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. So, that was a benefit. Young universities ditch the tenure system. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. 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 was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. People didn't take him seriously. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. 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." Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. Well, or I just didn't care. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? I made that choice consciously. [53][third-party source needed]. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. "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. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . He had to learn it. Let's sit and think about this seriously." ", "2014 National Convention Los Angeles Freedom From Religion Foundation", "Responding to Sean Carroll: What If There Had Been a Camera at the Resurrection? I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. You can be surprised. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. Carroll, S.B. At Los Alamos, yes. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. I did not succeed in that goal. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests.