Certainly, no one academic in my family. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. They just don't care. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. 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. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." I don't know. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. That includes me. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. Oral History Interviews | Sean Carroll | American Institute of Physics This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. I started blogging in 2004, and I was rejected in 2005 from Chicago. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. So, every person who came, [every] graduate student, was assigned an advisor, a faculty member, to just sort of guide them through their early years. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. He's the best graduate student I've ever had. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. 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. We're not developing a better smart phone. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. Sean Carroll was denied tenure at University of Chicago, but he - Quora Well, I just did the dumbest thing. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. But he didn't know me in high school. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. My mom was tickled. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." It falls short of that goal in some other ways. It was a very casual procedure. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. Everyone knew that was real. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. 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. 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. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. It had gotten a little stuck. Would I be interested in working on it with him? I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. They actually have gotten some great results. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. Should we let w be less than minus one?" I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. I had the best thesis committee ever. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. That's a very hard question. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. 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. [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. I did not succeed in that goal. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. I didn't really want to live there. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. 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. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want . Right. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth 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. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? One is you do get a halfway evaluation. That's okay. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. It moved away. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. No, you're completely correct. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. Some people love it. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. So, like I said, I really love topology. 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. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. Why don't people think that way? You don't really need to do much for those. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. I pretend that they're separate. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. Now, next year, I'll get a job. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. There's no delay on the line.