Not just that there are different approaches. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. 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. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Alright, Sean. 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. Then, the other big one was, again, I think the constant lesson as I'm saying all these words out loud is how bad my judgment has been about guiding my own academic career. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. All while I was in Santa Barbara. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? This is an example of it. Carroll has a B.S. So, we wrote a paper. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. The whole bit. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. I've gotten good at it. Everyone knows about that. I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. They saw the writing on the wall. So, an obvious question arises. I lucked into it, once again. I can do it, and it is fun. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. Huge excitement because of this paper. You know the answer to that." But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. But that's okay. Some of them might be. You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. I took almost all the physics classes. When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. Field. 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. 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? It's a messy thing. Absolutely brilliant course. If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. 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. No, you're completely correct. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? So, taste matters. This happens quite often. There's this huge gap in between what we give the popular press, where I have to fight for three equations in my book, and a textbook, which is three equations every paragraph. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. I don't know how public knowledge this is. But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. The Hubble constant is famously related to the dark energy, because it's the current value of the Hubble constant where dark energy is just taking over. I just drifted away very, very gradually. It's challenging. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. So, if, five or ten years from now, the sort of things that excite me do not include cutting edge theoretical physics, then so be it. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. He was a blessing, helping me out. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. Sean Carroll Height. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. 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. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. So, that's how I started working with Alan. I do this over and over again. No, not really. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. Let's get back to Villanova. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. 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. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. We'll figure it out. I think it's more that people don't care. Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. And part of it was because no one told me. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. We've already established that. That was always temporary. And that's the only thing you do. Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. So the bad news is. 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. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? Okay. 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? The actual job requirements -- a big part of it, the part that I take most seriously, and care most about -- is advising graduate students. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. I'm not making this up. Did you get any question like that? So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. There's always some institutional resistance. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. Whereas, my graduate students, I do work, they do work, but I do other things as well. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. But I don't remember what it was. Now, next year, I'll get a job. And he said, "Absolutely. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report.
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