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So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. So, that was definitely an option. So, that was with other graduate students. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? It's a messy thing. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? And I didn't. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. I think, they're businesspeople. In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. I had never heard of him before. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. That's why I said, "To first approximation." It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" That's when I have the most fun. And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. Okay. 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. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. I wrote a big review article about it. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. I like teaching a lot. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. So, I'm really quite excited about this. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. I think so. Would I be interested in working on it with him? But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. Suite 110 So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. It's just like being a professor. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. So, I kind of talked with my friends. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? 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. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. And in the meantime, Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and others, came up with this idea of phantom energy, which had w less than minus one. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. I mean, I could do it. 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. 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. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. Why do people get denied tenure? Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. No, not really. Or, I could say, "Screw it." I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. She never went to college. Now, you might ask, who cares? Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. 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? In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. That's fine. Six months is a very short period of time. Now, the academic titles. 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. What was he working on when you first met him? I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. Yeah. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." So, I was behind already. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. But it was kind of overwhelming. 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. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. The tuition was right. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. Stephen Morrow is his name. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. It would be bad. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. What's so great about right now? 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.