"I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that. It would be bad. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? The discovery was announced in July. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. What was your thought process along those lines? Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. That's not all of it. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." 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. So, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. I wonder if in some ways you're truly old fashioned in the way that what we would call scientists today, in the 17th and 18th century, they called natural philosophers. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? You can be surprised. I had never heard of him before. That's the message I received many, many times. And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. These were all live possibilities. Where are the equations I can solve? Yeah, no, good. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . You have enough room to get it right. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. But you're good at math. So, late 1997, Phil Lubin, who was an astronomy professor at Santa Barbara, organized a workshop at KITP on measuring cosmological parameters with the cosmic microwave background. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. Sean Carroll Height. You know, I wish I knew. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. People know who you are. But other people have various ways of getting to the . So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. The system has benefited them. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? Let me ask you that question specifically on the topic of religion. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. I will get water while you're doing that. Then why are you wasting my time? You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. I don't want to say anything against them. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." Again, I had great people at MIT. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? Theorists never get this job. It was very small. I don't want that left out of the historical record. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? It gets you a job in a philosophy department. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? Very, very much. All of them had the same idea, that the amount of matter in the universe acts as a break on the expansion rate of the universe. There are numerical variables and character variables. We wrote a lot of papers together. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". 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. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. I think, to some extent, yes. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . I love that, and they love my paper. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). So, that was one big thing. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. Not just that there are different approaches.