I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. Let every student carve out a path of study. What sparked that interest in you? And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." The tuition was right. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. They're not in the job of making me feel good. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. Did you connect with your father later in life? I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. No, no. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. What should we do? A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. [20] In 2014, he was awarded the Andrew Gemant Award by the American Institute of Physics for "significant contributions to the cultural, artistic or humanistic dimension of physics". Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. 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. So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I got a lot of books on astronomy. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. Not especially, no. But still, it was a very, very exciting time. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. Here is my thought process. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. Russell Wilson denies he wanted Pete Carroll and John Schneider fired We'll figure it out. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . She said, "John is right, and I was also right. 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. So, we talked about different possibilities. That's just not my thing. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it I literally got it yesterday on the internet. 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 . So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. 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. 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. I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? I have a short attention span. I pretend that they're separate. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. Because they pay for your tuition. Not a 100% expectation. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. And Chicago was somewhere in between. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. They come in different varieties. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. And it was a . If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? Learn new things about the world. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. I didn't really want to live there. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So, an obvious question arises. It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. That's my question. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. The unions were anathema. But those kind of big picture things, which there are little experiments here and there. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. I was taking Fortran. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. And this time, first I had to do it all by myself, but because I was again foolishly ambitious, I typed up all the lecture notes, so equations and everything, before each lecture, Xeroxed them and handed them out. 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. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. Certainly, no one academic in my family. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. Euclid's laws work pretty well. She never went to college. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. So, George was randomly assigned to me. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. His most-cited work, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due To New Gravitational Physics?" His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that. www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX, American Association of Physicists in Medicine, AVS: Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing. That's what really makes me feel successful. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Wildly enthusiastic reception.
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