The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? The unions were anathema. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. Again, I had great people at MIT. But, you know, the contingencies of history. 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. You have the equation. And in the meantime, Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and others, came up with this idea of phantom energy, which had w less than minus one. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. And who knows, it all worked out okay, but this sort of background, floating, invisible knowledge is really, really important, and was never there for me. It sounded very believable. This is the advice I tell my students. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. That's what really makes me feel successful. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. Hopefully it'll work out. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. They were all graduate students at the time. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. What are we going to do? Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. Well, it's true. If you actually take a scientific attitude toward the promotion of science, you can study what kinds of things work, and what kinds of approaches are most effective. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. I've gotten good at it. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. 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. Really, really great guy. Reply Insider . [53][third-party source needed]. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. Just get to know people. [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 made that choice consciously. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. There are numerical variables and character variables. 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. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. We're not developing a better smart phone. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. You don't really need to do much for those. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. She's very, very good. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. There's always some institutional resistance. This is an example of it. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. This is real physics. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. People had learned things, but it was very slow. Alright, Sean. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. What should we do? But there definitely has been a shift. Now, you might ask, who cares? My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. No, not really. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. And he said, "Absolutely. I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. Good. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. It was a summer school in Italy. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. I can do it, and it is fun. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. David, my pleasure. That's all it is. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. There's a bunch. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. Did you get any question like that? We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. He invited a few of us. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. But then, the thing is, I did. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. Institute for Theoretical Physics. Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. And the answer is, to most people, there is. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. So, I think it's a big difference. Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? It's a very small part of theoretical physics. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. One, drive research forward. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings.