It wasn't really clear. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. Who did you work with? We'll figure it out. I think so. Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. But it was kind of overwhelming. And it's not just me. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. A Surprise Point of Agreement With Sean Carroll I think all three of those things are valid and important. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. Mark Hoffman was his name. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. 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. Young universities ditch the tenure system. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. 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. So, we talked about different possibilities. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. I got the Packard Fellowship. The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. 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. Then why are you wasting my time? So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. Measure all the matter in the universe. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . I don't always succeed. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. I don't know how public knowledge this is. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. So, if, five or ten years from now, the sort of things that excite me do not include cutting edge theoretical physics, then so be it. But those kind of big picture things, which there are little experiments here and there. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. 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. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. So, I went to a large public school. 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. Let's just say that. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. 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. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. Would that be on that level? So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. But I did learn something. 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. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. Go longer. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. I just drifted away very, very gradually. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. Sean Carroll's Mindscape - Wondery | Premium Podcasts The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. This happens quite often. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. I get that all the time. Sean Carroll. So, I did, and they became very popular. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. Suite 110 We certainly never worked together. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. No, you're completely correct. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" I think I did not really feel that, honestly. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. And I said, "Yeah, sure." You can be surprised. That's why I said, "To first approximation." I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. So, I used it for my own purposes. I think that is part of it. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. Does Sean Carroll Take Phd Students? - Online Phd Program Young people. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . I'm close enough. Let's get back to Villanova. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. Like, I did it. Sean on Twitter: "Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at - reddit Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy.

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