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. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. We're not developing a better smart phone. I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. Everyone knew that was real. 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. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. I had the best thesis committee ever. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. Literally, my office mate, while I was in graduate school, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating universe -- not while he was in graduate school, but later. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. It was hard to figure out what the options were. Another bad planning on my part. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. 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. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." 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. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. People still do it. Some people love it. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. Oh, yeah, entirely. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. 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. Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. 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. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. Let's sit and think about this seriously." Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. I think, to some extent, yes. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . They just don't care. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. So, that was with other graduate students. In some extent, it didn't. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. This is the advice I tell my students. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. I'm not sure. . Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. Really, really great guy. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. Ten of those men and no women were successful. An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. 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. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. I didn't really want to live there. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. Sean Carroll Height. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. Sean, to go back to the question in high school about whether or not a Harvard or a Princeton was on your radar, I'm curious, as a junior or a senior at Villanova, given that economically, and even geographically, you were not so far away from where you were as a high schooler, what had changed where now a place like a Harvard would have seemed within reach? I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. You can challenge them if that seems right. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? 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. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." I've done it. There's good physics reasons. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits . I will get water while you're doing that. 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. 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. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. So, like I said, we were for a long time in observational astronomy trying to understand how much stuff there is in the universe, how much matter there is. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. Faculty are used to disappointment. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. This didn't shut up the theorists. The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. The world has changed a lot. So, I'm a big believer in the disciplines, but it would be at least fun to experiment with the idea of a university that just hired really good people. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do 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. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. So, I kind of talked with my friends. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. 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. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. Let's just say that. [37] Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. I really wanted to move that forward. Let every student carve out a path of study. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. 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. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. What am I going to do? If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. Sean Carroll Family. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. We could discover what the dark matter is. Some of them might be. I had this email from a woman who said, literally, when she was 12 years old, she was at some event, and she was there with her parents, and they happened to sit next to me at a table, and we talked about particle physics, and she wrote just after she got accepted to the PhD program at Oxford in particle physics, and she said it all started with that conversation. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. It's a research institute in Santa Fe that is devoted to the study of complexity in all its forms. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. Institute for Theoretical Physics. One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? 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.". He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. 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. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before.