Michael Taylor Attorney, Articles W

So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. What are the odds? I'm very happy with that. Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? I think, they're businesspeople. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Learn new things about the world. Amy Bishop and the Trauma of Tenure Denial | Psychology Today It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. Thank goodness. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. We'll figure it out. That would be great. Some field needs to care. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. Graduate school is a different thing. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. So, I'm really quite excited about this. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. But he didn't know me in high school. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. [32][33][34] Some of his work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity and the arrow of time. I was really surprised." 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. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. Like, that's a huge thing. Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. That's absolutely true. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. 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. Maybe that's not fair. Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." I was still thought to be a desirable property. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. You know, students are very different. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. Sean Carroll was denied tenure at University of Chicago, but he - Quora The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. As much as I love those people, I should have gone somewhere else and really shocked my system a little bit. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. That just didn't happen. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. We're not developing a better smart phone. 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. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. And we started talking, and it was great. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. Absolutely the same person.". So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. It's not overturning all of physics. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. 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. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. It worked for them, and they like it. Sean Payton addresses Russell Wilson's private office But there's an enormous influence put on your view of reality by all of these pre-existing propositions that you think are probably true. His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. So, my three years at Santa Barbara, every single year, I thought I'll just get a faculty job this year, and my employability plummeted. Look at the dynamics of the universe and figure out how much matter there must be in there and compare that to what you would guess the amount of matter should be. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. But then, the thing is, I did. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. Some of them might be. Oh, kinds of physics. 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. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. There's an equation you can point to. That's it. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. When I went to graduate school at Harvard, of course, it was graduate school, but I could tell that the undergraduate environment was entirely different. Six months is a very short period of time. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. What am I going to do? And that got some attention also. 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? They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. I think I did not really feel that, honestly. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road So, they had clearly not talked to each other. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. I get that all the time. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. You got a full scholarship there, of course. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. If you actually take a scientific attitude toward the promotion of science, you can study what kinds of things work, and what kinds of approaches are most effective. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! 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. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. 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. I got a lot of books on astronomy. Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. At Los Alamos, yes. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. Carroll has a B.S. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. 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. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . Since I wrote The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. I'm not going to really worry about it. So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. 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?