Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. And I answered it. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? 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. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. She could pinpoint it there. I like teaching a lot. Euclid's laws work pretty well. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. He wrote wonderful popular books. So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. You mean generally across the faculty. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. I've gotten good at it. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? You're not going to get tenure. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. None of that at Chicago. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? That's my question. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . I like the idea of debate. 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. 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. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. It's challenging. But there definitely has been a shift. Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. It just came out of the blue. Six months is a very short period of time. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. They're like, what is a theory? Again, I was wrong over and over again. 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. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. She never went to college. (2020) A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.Princeton University Press. 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. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. There's a lot of inertia. 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. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. So, he was an enormous help to me, but it's not like there were twenty other people who were doing the same kind of thing, and you hang out and have lunch and go to parties and talk about Feynman diagrams. 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 . 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. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. We knew he's going pass." But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. I'm just thrilled we were able to do this. 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. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? . Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. I got a lot of books on astronomy. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. I don't know how public knowledge this is. Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. Let's put it that way. 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.