And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. So, that was one big thing. The discovery was announced in July. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. So, probably, yes, I would still have the podcast even if I'd gone to law school. But you're good at math. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. They actually have gotten some great results. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. It's just really, really hard." So, I was behind already. 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.". What sparked that interest in you? So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. That's what I am. Again, I was wrong over and over again. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. The unhappy result of preferring less candor is the loss we all feel now.". His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." So, there's three quarters in an academic year. 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. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. I'm not sure how much time passed. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. That's right. As much as I love those people, I should have gone somewhere else and really shocked my system a little bit. 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. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. I really do think that in some sense, the amount that a human being is formed and shaped, as a human being, not as a scientist, is greater when they're an undergraduate than when they're a graduate. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. 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. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. You were starting to do that. I think there are plenty of physicists. This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. It's challenging. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. 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. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. 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. 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. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. We'll have to see. So, George was randomly assigned to me. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." Some people love it. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. Huge excitement because of this paper. I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. Good. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. You've been around the block a few times. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. We could discover what the dark matter is. Reply Insider . Sorry about that. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. I'm close enough. They're a little bit less intimidated. I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. I do a lot of outreach, but if you look closely at what I do, it's all trying to generate new ideas and make arguments. I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. We've already established that. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". Those poor biologists had no chance that year. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. I don't agree with what they do. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment.
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