Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. He had to learn it. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. Well, sorry, also one string theorist: Barton Zwiebach was there. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. It was a tough decision, but I made it. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. . I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. That's the job. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? That's the case I tried to make. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. It wasn't really clear. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. Physics does give you that. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. It was a huge success. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Field. There's nobody working on using insights from the foundation of quantum mechanics to help understand quantum gravity, or at least, very, very few people. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. It was a summer school in Italy. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. Spread the word. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. This could be great. But those kind of big picture things, which there are little experiments here and there. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. Graduate school is a different thing. Completely blindsided. I think it's more that people don't care. That's just the system. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. You know, I wish I knew. We'll have to see. And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. Someone said it. 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. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. I just want to say. Because they pay for your tuition. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? Maybe not. In many ways, it was a great book. What am I going to do? Happy to be breathing the air. Again, I was wrong over and over again. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. Now, can I promise you that the benefit is worth the cost, and I wouldn't actually be better off just sitting down and spending all of my time thinking about that one thing? Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. The South Pole telescope is his baby. No, quite the opposite. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. Let's put it that way. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. So, that was with other graduate students. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. Good. 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. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. 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. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. 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. I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? I think it's gone by now. So, here's another funny story. I think so. Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me. That's it. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. He is a man of above-average stature. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. It's at least possible. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. In some extent, it didn't. The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. Since I wrote It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. Certainly, no one academic in my family. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. 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. But other people have various ways of getting to the . I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. No, no. So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . 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?
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