I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. 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. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. Again, I was wrong. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. 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. The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. Came up with a good idea. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. And that's the only thing you do. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. I think it was like $800 million. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. That's a huge effect on people's lives. Well, it's true. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? Yeah. 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. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. What are the odds? Why do people get denied tenure? It's not good time management, but we did it and we enjoyed it. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. I think it's bad in the following way. What are we going to do? But research professor is a faculty member. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. Let's put it that way. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. So, let's get off the tenure thing. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. They were very bad at first. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. Who was on your thesis committee? So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want . I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. That's right. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. Like, ugh. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. You really have to make a case. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? 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. In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. Ten of those men and no women were successful. We made a new prediction for the microwave background, which was very interesting. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. 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. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. I got the Packard Fellowship. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. You know the answer to that." There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. A video of the debate can be seen here. I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" There are evil people out there. George and Terry team-taught a course on early universe cosmology using the new book by Kolb and [Michael] Turner that had just come out, because Terry was Rocky Kolb's graduate student at Chicago. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. Well, Harvard -- the astronomy department, which was part and parcel of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- so, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory joined together in the 1970s to form this big institution, which I still think might be the largest collection of astronomy PhDs, in the United States, anyway. It was not a very strict Catholic school. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? The system has benefited them. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. 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. but academe is treacherous. [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". It's my personal choice. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. I was less good of a fit there. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? I literally got it yesterday on the internet. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. I won't say a know-it-all attitude, because I don't necessarily think I knew it all, but I did think that I knew what was best for myself. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. I can just do what I want. It was very small. That was not on my radar. It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. So, we talked about different possibilities. They decide to do physics for a living. So, there's three quarters in an academic year. 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. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. 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 say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. 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. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. I haven't given it up yet. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. 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. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. My response to him was, "No thanks." Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? Yes, I think so. So, in that sense, technology just hasn't had a lot to say because we haven't been making a lot of discoveries, so we don't need to worry about that. Recent Books. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. Someone like me, for example, who is very much a physicist, but also is interested in philosophy, and I would like to be more active even than I am at philosophy at the official level, writing papers and things like that. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. I just want to say. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. 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. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." 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. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. 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. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?"