There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. It was a big hit to. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. That's a very hard question. In retrospect, there's two big things. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. There's a bunch. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. Now, the academic titles. These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. By the way, all these are hard. [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. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. This is literally the words that I was told. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. Well, that's interesting. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. 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. I thought I knew what I was doing. 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. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. I love that, and they love my paper. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. So, we talked about different possibilities. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. He wrote wonderful popular books. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. They were very bad at first. Let's just say that. Let's start with the research first. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. That just didn't happen. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. Who hasn't written one, really? You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. They're a little bit less intimidated. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. 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. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. So, that was one big thing. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. Reply Insider . I will confess the error of my ways. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. That was always true. No, no. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Don't have "a bad year.". It just came out of the blue. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? That includes me. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. They were all graduate students at the time. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. That's a recognized thing that's going on. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. Tenure denial, seven years later. So the bad news is. 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. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. 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 . 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. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. There was, but it was kind of splintered because of this large number of people. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. Yes. I was taking Fortran. I think it's part of a continuum. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. 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. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. 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. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. But there definitely has been a shift. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. She never went to college. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? I think, they're businesspeople. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. I think that's the right way to put it. Cole. But maybe it could. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. I think that the vast majority of benefit that students get from their university education is from interacting with other students. I think I got this wrong once. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff.
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