Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. You've been around the block a few times. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. You were starting to do that. That's a recognized thing that's going on. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. He used that to offer me a job, to pay my salary. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. Faculty are used to disappointment. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. None of that at Chicago. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? I took the early universe [class] from Alan. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? And he says, "Yes, everything the Santa Fe Institute has ever done counts." Six months is a very short period of time. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. So, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. But I did learn something. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. We'll measure it." Did you do that self-consciously? They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. Certainly, no one academic in my family. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. 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. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. Playing the game, writing the papers that got highly cited, being in the mainstream, and doing things that everyone agreed were interesting, which I did to a certain extent but not all the way when I was in Chicago. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. But I'm classified as a physicist. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. Thanks very much. There's an equation you can point to. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. 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 costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. 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. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. When I told Ed Guinan, my undergraduate advisor, that I had George Field as an advisor, he said, "Oh, you got lucky." There were two that were especially good. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" Let's put it that way. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. More than just valid. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. I'm an atheist. 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. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. This is so exciting because you are one of the best interviewers out there, so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. Perhaps, to get back to an earlier comment about some of the things that are problematic about academic faculty positions, as you say, yes, sometimes there is a positive benefit to trends, but on the other hand, when you're establishing yourself for an academic career, that's a career that if all goes well will last for many, many decades where trends come and go. So far so good. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. That just didn't happen. Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. Well, that's interesting. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. That's when I have the most fun. Or, I could say, "Screw it." I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. Then why are you wasting my time? It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." So, I used it for my own purposes. Again, I had great people at MIT. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. Two and a half years I've been doing it, and just like with the videos, my style and my presentation has been improving, I hope, over time. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. It was fine. There's always some institutional resistance. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. 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. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. 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 like teaching a lot. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. My response to him was, "No thanks." That one and a follow up to that. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. So, I want to do something else. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. 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? No, not really. But within the course of a week -- coincidence problem -- Vikram Duvvuri, who was a graduate student in Chicago, knocked on my door, and said, "Has anyone ever thought of taking R and adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity and seeing what would happen?" It doesn't need to be confined to a region. The thing that people are looking for, the experimental effort these days, and for very good reason, is aimed at things that we think are plausibly true. Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." November 16, 2022 9:15 am. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. So, that would happen. So, taste matters. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. 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. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) We knew he's going pass." But you're good at math. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. 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 members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits .
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