A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. The tuition was right. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. Why tenure is so important yet rare for Black professors Be prolific and reliable. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. Yeah. It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. There's good physics reasons. She's very, very good. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. Again, I was wrong. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. I don't think so. In retrospect, there's two big things. So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want . We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. 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. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. 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. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. Advertising on podcasts is really effective compared to TV or radio or webpages. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. And now I know it. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. It was -- I don't know. 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. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. I think, to some extent, yes. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. So the bad news is. I think people like me should have an easier time. I don't want that left out of the historical record. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. Sean on Twitter: "Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at - reddit Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. Yes, but it's not a very big one. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. Since I wrote But there definitely has been a shift. 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. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. Well, most people got tenure. We used Wald, and it was tough. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. We're kind of out of that. Or there was. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. People still do it. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. I don't agree with what they do. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. Benefits of tenure. Thanks very much. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. 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. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. He is not at all ashamed to tell you that and explains things sometimes in his talks about cosmology by reference to his idea about God's existence. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. You don't really need to do much for those. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. 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's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . 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. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? Fast forward to 2011. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff.