But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. Yeah. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. Would that be on that level? Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. I like the idea of debate. I don't know how public knowledge this is. It was a summer school in Italy. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. 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. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. And that's not bad or cynical. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. That's absolutely true. We'll measure it." So, a lot of the reasons why my path has been sort of zig-zaggy and back and forth is because -- I guess, the two reasons are: number one, I didn't have great sources of advice, and number two, I wasn't very good at taking the advice when I got it. So, that's what he would do. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. People are sitting around with little aperitifs, or whatever, late at night. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. This is real physics. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. Sean Carroll's Mindscape - Wondery | Premium Podcasts By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. Well, it's true. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. It is remarkable. At the time, . In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? 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. Why did you do that?" This is an example of it. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. No one told me. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. I'm not sure. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. 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. And that's the only thing you do. The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. And he's like, "Sure." 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. A derivative is the slope of something. That's not all of it. We used Wald, and it was tough. 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. 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. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. Who did you work with? There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. Let's get back to Villanova. 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. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. One, drive research forward. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. Faculty are used to disappointment. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . 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. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. What were the most interesting topics at that time? 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. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. How Not to Get Tenure - Outside the Beltway I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. 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. 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. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. Yes, well that's true. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. Onondaga County. 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. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. But most of us didn't think it was real. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. I was in Sidney's office all the time. So, that appeared in my book as a vignette. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers.