So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. Is this where you want to be long-term, or is it possible that an entirely new opportunity could come along that could compel you that maybe this is what you should pursue next? So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. David, my pleasure. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. That's not data. 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. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. You're not going to get tenure. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? It was very small. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. . And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. 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. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. I didn't stress about that. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. Faculty are used to disappointment. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. I'm not making this up. It was very long. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. Suite 110 The whole bit. It's not just a platitude. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. 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. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. It's a messy thing. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. 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. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? I think so. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. 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. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. It's difficult, yes. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. That's it. Well, it's true. So, again, I foolishly said yes. 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? That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. 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. 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. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. Not especially, no. That's just not my thing. I love writing books so much. Everyone knows -- Milgrom said many years ago in the case of dark matter, but everyone knows in the case of dark energy -- that maybe you can modify gravity to get rid of the need for dark matter or dark energy. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." We had problem sets that we graded. I haven't given it up yet. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. 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 thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. This is something that's respectable.". But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. 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." Mark Hoffman was his name. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. Right. At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. College Park, MD 20740 I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. It was fine. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. Very, very important. Thank goodness. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things.