Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. That's how philosophy goes. 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. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. They're rare. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. Then, you enter graduate school as more or less a fully formed person, and you learn to do science. It was July 4th. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. They come in different varieties. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. 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. They didn't know. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. And I said, "Yeah, sure." But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. He had to learn it. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. I think to first approximation, no. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. 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. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. 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 love it. 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. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. So, I was done in 20 minutes. Let's face it, quantum mechanics, gravitation, cosmology, these are fields that need a lot of help. It's not overturning all of physics. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. But other people have various ways of getting to the . I did everything right. Sorry about that. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. You know the answer to that." Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. 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? Because they pay for your tuition. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? No one told me. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. But that's okay. And I wasn't working on either one of those. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. I love writing books so much. I don't want that left out of the historical record. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. Carroll, S.B. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. What was he working on when you first met him? Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? I was on the advanced track, and so forth. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. And I've guessed. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. 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. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. 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. 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. Spread the word. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? 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. Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. 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. Yeah, absolutely. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. And he's like, "Sure." I said, well, what about R plus one over R? I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." Why is that? But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. I've done it. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one.
Nisan 14 2025,
Foreclosure Homes Rock Hill, Sc,
Pierre Jolivet Agresseur De Sandrine Bonnaire,
Houses For Rent In Blackfoot, Idaho,
Articles W