Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. I think people like me should have an easier time. Let's put it that way. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. I had the results. That was great, a great experience. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. It's just really, really hard." Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. And it was a . The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. I mean, I could do it. This didn't shut up the theorists. I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. I don't agree with what they do. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. That's just not my thing. "What major research universities care about is research. That's all it is. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. It would be bad. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. There's always some institutional resistance. You can be surprised. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. Wildly enthusiastic reception. When I went to graduate school at Harvard, of course, it was graduate school, but I could tell that the undergraduate environment was entirely different. Well, how would you know? There were hints of it. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. It was a very casual procedure. 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. So, that was one big thing. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. So, I think it's a big difference. Be prolific and reliable. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . That was a glimpse of what could be possible. This is an example of it. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." I took the early universe [class] from Alan. That's what really makes me feel successful. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. They basically admitted that. He had to learn it. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. We don't care what you do with it." For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. We've already established that. It's difficult, yes. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. Let's just say that. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. 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. Now, look, if I'm being objective, maybe this dramatically decreases my chances of having a paper that makes a big impact, because I'm not writing papers that other people are already focused on. There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. 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. 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. His most-cited work, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due To New Gravitational Physics?" Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. Again, I was wrong. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. The whole bit. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. You get dangerous. Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. 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. Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. A lot of people focus on the fact that he was so good at reaching out to broad audiences, in an almost unprecedented way, that they forget that he was really a profound thinker as well. The discussion with Stuart Bartlett was no exception. There are evil people out there. It's an honor. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. 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 much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. We're creeping up on it. Sean Carroll Height. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? Reply Insider . Did you connect with your father later in life? I think it's gone by now. I've done it. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. 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 . Let's get back to Villanova. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. 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. So, there's just too many people to talk to, really. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. So, you can think of throwing a ball up into the air, and it goes up, but it goes up ever more slowly, because the Earth's gravitational pull is pulling it down. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. I think I got this wrong once. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. I think so. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." 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. That just didn't happen. What are the odds? You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. The unhappy result of preferring less candor is the loss we all feel now.". To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. I love that, and they love my paper. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. So, like I said, I really love topology. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. It is January 4th, 2021. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. Also, they were all really busy and tired. A stylistic clash, I imagine. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. We don't understand economics or politics. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. No sensible person doubted they would happen. So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. But he was very clear. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. 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. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? But it was kind of overwhelming. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. Well, one ramification of that is technological. I'll be back. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. It has not. 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.