2min chapter

Lex Fridman Podcast cover image

Sean Carroll: Quantum Mechanics and the Many-Worlds Interpretation

Lex Fridman Podcast

CHAPTER

Are You Trusting the Beauty and the Power of the Predictive Power of Science?

"I think that I do have a pretty good intuitive understanding of fields pervading spacetime," he says. "Of course, one's intuition gets worse and worse as you get trickier in the quantum field theory" But it's also OK to say that our intuitions get trained -- we can train them little bit.

00:00
Speaker 2
Both as a scientist and as a philosopher, what's your take on AI and whether or not it's an existential threat?
Speaker 1
I don't know whether it's an existential threat or not. I am very, very, very skeptical that it is. But again, there's a possibility of it. My take is that there's a whole bunch of really obvious threats that are not existential, but that are very near-term and very looming from AI. There's also huge benefits. It's a very typical mixed thing, just like fire has advantages and disadvantages. So does AI. And water. Yeah, exactly. Lots of things, right. But so, and I think that if we actually put an effort into thinking carefully through and guarding against the obvious near-term worries that we have about AI, that will have a downstream effect of helping us prevent the bigger existential threats. Whereas if we spend a lot of time talking about the existential threats, these near-term threats are going to knock us down before we ever get around to it.
Speaker 2
What I like about your work is that it's accessible to laypeople and you're right for laypeople. You do a blog, as you have mentioned. You're also pretty open about a professional experience you had some years ago, where you were denied tenure. I think it was at the University of Chicago. Yeah. And do you place some of the blame for that on fellow academics' responses to the fact that you were writing a popular blog? Can you explain that and what you think happened?
Speaker 1
Actually, to clarify that one, I do not think it was the blog. I did have a blog at the time. Okay. In fact, I literally wrote a blog post afterward with the title, It's Not the Blog.
Speaker 2
Okay. My bet. Yeah.
Speaker 1
I don't think it helped. I think it hurt a little bit, but it wasn't a major thing. I'll tell you what hurt more is that I wrote a textbook on general relativity for graduate students. And that is why, I mean, they explicitly told me that- Why would that hurt? Here is my understanding, such as it is. Like, I didn't get a vote. I wasn't there. So it's all kind of secondhand, right? But when you hire a faculty member at an elite research institution, you do so as a department, you hire with hope, right? You're like, this person could be great. So let's give them a chance. But when it comes to keeping them six or seven years later, you fire on the basis of fear. You are really, really frozen with fear at the prospect that you will give this person tenure. And then they will be your colleague for the next 40 years and they will stop doing work. That's what you're really desperately afraid of. And as a result, the single thing that is in people's minds is we don't want to give tenure to people who indicate that they are interested in doing things other than research. And that includes writing textbooks. It also includes writing blogs, but I don't even think that most of my colleagues knew that I had a blog at the time. But the fact that I would take almost a year of my life to write a textbook when I could have been doing research was a gigantic strike against me.
Speaker 2
Well, that's, you know, I find that quite terrible because what happened to the principal of paying it forward and seeding the ground and cultivating future minds who might be researchers themselves in their own right coming up the ranks? Who's supposed to do the teaching then?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, it's hilariously incoherent because many of my colleagues, including ones who voted against me, had written textbooks themselves. They just were smart enough to do it after they got tenure. So even if you're going to write a textbook, you can't let people know that you're the kind of person who would write a textbook. But you know, look, I am completely in favor of departments and universities having the right to not give people tenure if they don't want them around, if they think they can do better. With somebody else, my complaint there with that particular arrangement was just they never gave me any hint that anything was going to happen. They everyone who talked to me said, Oh yeah, you'll get tenure, no problem. And that was a life changing kind of blow and it did happen.
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, that's where you began to learn a little bit more about probabilities to. There you go.
Speaker 1
I'm going to ask you for some free advice. One of the reasons
Speaker 2
I'm very excited to have you on, and generally we have people who are lawyers or policymakers of a certain stripe on the show is that my youngest son is thinking about and choosing between major and he's a freshman in college majoring in engineering or physics or some other discipline that's related to those things. Do you have a view? You've written about the fact that you got both your undergraduate degree and your graduate degree in astronomy versus some other related discipline like physics, which we've been talking about a lot. Does it matter?
Speaker 1
It does matter. You know, as I indicated at the beginning of our conversation, I have made things harder than they needed to be for myself at every step along the way. And you can become a physicist getting an astronomy degree or vice versa. For that matter, I have friends who are professors of philosophy who got a degree in physics and not in philosophy. Like many things are possible in this issue also, but it's very hard to pursue a career in academia and get a job. You know, the number of people who want to get these jobs, I tell my students in the graduate program, the ones who are going to get a PhD, the rule of thumb is maybe 25% of you will actually get a faculty job as your long-term employment. So you are absolutely playing a game of probability here and by being quirky, by writing books, by majoring in the wrong thing, etc, etc. You don't make it impossible for yourself, but you're not making it easier on yourself either. So one final thing I do want to get across is that I love encouraging people to become professional physicists, philosophers, whatever, but it's not my primary thing. I want everyone to love this stuff. You know, my most recent book is trying to explain physics to a broad audience, but with all the math. So I teach you the math and then I try to get you excited about looking at equations for the first time anew. And I don't know if it's whether it's working or not, but that's really what I'm about. I want all human beings to have passionate opinions about contentious issues in modern physics. As opposed to learning how their phone works. That would be great too. I should learn how my phone works. You've really made me feel guilty now.

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