Here is a special bonus punishment treat for Mindscape listeners: an interview of me, by David Zierler of the American Institute of Physics’s Oral History project. This is a fantastic project that collects interviews with influential physicists of all ages, and apparently sometimes less-influential physicists. So if you’d like to hear my (academic) life story boiled down to a mere four hours, here you go!
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It’s well worth checking out the AIP Oral History Project website, which has over 1000 fascinating interviews with physicists from different decades. The transcript of this particular interview can be found there. Thanks to David and the AIP for letting us include this as a bonus podcast episode.
Oh God I believe these 4 hours would be truly fascinating, always curious about how someone after such a long interview
Fascinating and very enjoyable! Conversation was so interesting that the time flew by. Thanks for sharing it with your listeners.
Dear Prof. Carroll,
Although it is expected to have some minor spellings in the AIP transcript, I believe the following one should be corrected: Around 03:04:00, when describing an argument from your latest paper, the transcript reads “this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. Because, I said, you assume there’s non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion.” In the audio, however, I believe you actually said “you assume there’s *no* non-physical stuff,” which in fact makes sense from the argument’s perspective.
The only reason I’m a little hesitant in alerting this is that I’m not a native English speaker, so I could have hallucinated that “no” above. In any case, I loved the interview! I’m a fan of yours ever since my freshman year, and always wanted to know more about yourself and your career. One day, I hope I’ll have my copy of “From Eternity to Here” signed by you—as well as my copy of “Me, Myself, and Why” signed by Jennifer :-).
Best regards to both of you,
Jr.
I have been a fan of yours for a long time and while I have learned much from your talks, blog and your speakers, it is a real treat to be able to listen to your personal trajectory that in so many ways mirrors the recent trajectory of fundamental physics itself. We all hope that you continue to reach across disciples to inform us and your pursuit of the fundamentals of QM. We need bright lights like yours. Thank you.
I was disappointed to hear you would be leaving Caltech,
and I imagine Feynman would be sorry you would not be staying at his desk.
But as long as you continue to inspire and write physics papers, I guess I shouldn’t be too devastated.
When you talked about your Biggest Ideas podcasts, from which I learned of the
Reeh-Schlieder (Taj Mahal) theorem, and then mentioned the black hole information paradox,
it occurred to me that perhaps the theorem provides a resolution to the paradox.
If the information associated with an object is really a part of the global quantum field,
then perhaps that information is no more lost when the object falls into a black hole
than the object’s charge, mass, or angular momentum?
By shear coincidence I ran into this book ‘Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air’ by Sarah Bridle. I delved into her background and I was astonished how much it reminded me of the opening comments on the academic world of this podcast on how silos of expertise restrict the flow of ideas. The best way I can describe Sarah Bridle PhD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bridle academic career is that of an data scientist. She is known for her work applying statistical techniques to cosmology and the search for dark matter in particular. More recently she has shifted her interests and has applied het knowledge to how we produce and consume food and how this contributes to climate change.
I listened to Ms Bridle on BBC Radio 4 A Life Scientific presented by Jim Al-Khalili https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000sqk6 . I was blown away and if you can spare 30 minutes I recommend you listen. This is a great story of how expertise acquired in one area of science can be used to further our knowledge in an other field of research.