One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. I had it. 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. Alright, Sean. Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. Certainly, no one academic in my family. 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. People didn't take him seriously. 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. But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. 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. You get different answers from different people. The system has benefited them. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. I've done it. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. We don't understand economics or politics. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." He's the best graduate student I've ever had. It moved away. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. That's the job. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. It might have been by K.C. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. Everyone knows about that. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. So, I went to a large public school. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. Onondaga County. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. The South Pole telescope is his baby. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. 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 . Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. 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. So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . And I've guessed. 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. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. Planning, not my forte. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. Was that the game plan from day one for you? 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? 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. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. On Carroll's view the universe begins to exist at the Big Bang only in the sense that a yardstick begins to exist at the first inch. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. His article "Does the Universe Need God?" That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. He was a very senior guy. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. It was a tough decision, but I made it. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. I have a short attention span. It's not a good or a bad kind. . I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. Would I be interested in working on it with him? That would have been a very different conversation if I had. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. So, there's just too many people to talk to, really. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. It's at least possible. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? 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. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. So, I used it for my own purposes. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. Came up with a good idea. I'm not making this up. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. Stephen Morrow is his name. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? In some extent, it didn't. 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. And he said, "Absolutely. "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. So, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then a few looking forward. I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. But the idea that there's any connection with what we do as professional scientists and these bigger questions about the nature of reality is just not one that modern physicists have. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. I remember -- who was I talking to? Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. It's funny that you mention law school. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. 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. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. I had never heard of him before. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. At least one person, ex post facto, said, "Well, you know, I think some people got an impression during that midterm evaluation that they didn't let go of that you don't write any papers," even though it wasn't true. Some of them are excellent, but it's almost by accident that they appear to be excellent. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. It's not just trendiness. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? And I wasn't working on either one of those. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. This could be great. You really have to make a case. 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 . It's a necessary thing but the current state of theoretical physicists is guessing. 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. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. Thank goodness. It sounded very believable. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. And it's not just me.