To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. It doesn't always work. 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? 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. [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. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . The dynamo, the Biermann battery, the inverse cascade, magnetic helicity, plasma effects, all of these things that are kind of hard for my purely theoretical physicist heart to really wrap my mind around. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. This is an example of it. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. 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. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. So, all of those things. We don't know the theory of everything. They are clearly different in some sense. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. I remember that. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? I think I did not really feel that, honestly. And Chicago was somewhere in between. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. This is probably 2000. I have a short attention span. 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? So, that's one important implication. There are so many people at Chicago. No one told me. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. 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. Sean Carroll on Twitter I don't think so. That just didn't happen. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. You know when someone wants to ask a question. Three, tell people about it. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. Because you've been at it long enough now, what have been some of the most efficacious strategies that you've found to join those two difficulties? We don't know what to do with this." It was a very casual procedure. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. They have a certain way of doing things. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. 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. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. So, taste matters. I put an "s" on both of them. [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. Let's start with the research first. On the point of not having quantum field theory as an undergraduate, I wonder, among your cohort, if you felt that you stuck out, like a more working class kid who went to Villanova, and that was very much not the profile of your fellow graduate students. There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Carroll has a B.S. I did everything right. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. Alright, Sean. 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 also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. So, that was a benefit. But that's okay. Right. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. He was a blessing, helping me out. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. It was very long. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. No, not really. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. So, that was true in high school. It's not a good or a bad kind. So, on the one hand, I got that done, and it was very popular. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. So, the paper that I wrote is called The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes. Supervenience is this idea in philosophy that one level depends on another level in a certain way and supervenes on the lower level.

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