No, no. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. 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. Very, very much. 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. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. 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. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. That's absolutely true. They chew you up and spit you out. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. We'll have to see. And the answer is, to most people, there is. Then, of course, Richard Dawkins wrong The God Delusion and sold a bajillion copies. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? 4. So, they knew everything that I had done. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. I have a lot of graduate students. I was a theorist. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. Oh, yeah. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . You know when someone wants to ask a question. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. 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. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. He's supposed to answer the questions." Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. 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, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." The two advantages I can think of are, number one, at that time, it's a very specific time, late '80s, early '90s -- specific in the sense that both particle physics and astronomy were in a lull. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. It's just really, really hard." And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. That's when I have the most fun. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. They actually have gotten some great results. 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. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Well, most people got tenure. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. 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. We just knew we couldn't afford it. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. 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. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? You can challenge them if that seems right. She said, "John is right, and I was also right. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. Move on with it. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. 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? So, we talked about different possibilities. 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. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. Or a biochemist, right? Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. I can just do what I want. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . I love it. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. More than one. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. 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. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. I don't think it has anything to do with what's more important, or fundamental, or exciting, or better science, but there is a certain kind of discipline that you learn in learning physics, and a certain bag of tricks and intellectual guiding stars that you pick up that are very, very helpful. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." Two and a half years I've been doing it, and just like with the videos, my style and my presentation has been improving, I hope, over time. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? You know, there's a lot we don't understand. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . Or other things. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. I do try my best to be objective. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. It's a messy thing. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. This is the advice I tell my students. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? I really wanted to move that forward. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. 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. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. It was hard to figure out what the options were. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. I think we only collaborated on two papers. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. 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? Everyone knows about that. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. He was doing intellectual work in the process of public outreach, which is really, really hard, and he was just a master at it as well as being an extremely accomplished planetary scientist, and working with NASA and so forth.