Sean Carroll: What Would Stephen Hawking Do?
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2015
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sean Carroll gets a fabulous job offer—to work with Stephen Hawking—twice. Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. His most recent book is The Particle at the End of the Universe. He has been awarded the Gemant Award by the American Institute of Physics, and the Winton Prize of the Royal Society of London. He frequently consults for film and television, and has been featured on shows such as The Colbert Report, NOVA, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | I felt it. |
| 0:07.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hey, everyone. I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:29.9 | This week's story is from Sean Carroll. It was recorded in April 2015 at Oberon in Cambridge, Massachusetts as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. |
| 0:43.3 | It all started when I got a phone call from Stephen Hawking. |
| 0:48.3 | This was 1992. I was a graduate student at Harvard, just up the street, and Stephen Hawking wanted to offer me a job, a postdoctoral job. So you can imagine this is a big deal. We're here celebrating gravity and 100 years of general relativity, and Stephen Hawking has done more to help us understand how gravity works than any person since Albert Einstein, essentially. |
| 1:12.5 | And it's also true that you would like to think that young scientists are all about solving the mysteries of the universe, |
| 1:19.7 | but from tonight's stories you figure out, really young scientists are all about getting jobs. |
| 1:24.4 | And then, you know, the secrets of the universe will hopefully follow. |
| 1:28.3 | So the good news is Stephen Hawking wants to offer me a job. The bad news is I was not in the |
| 1:33.9 | office when the phone rang. It was my office mate, Brian, who actually answered the phone and he |
| 1:39.7 | got the call. And it really is Stephen Hawking. You hear Stephen Hawking's voice when he calls you, and then he says his sort of prearranged greeting, and then you get handed off to other people, because it takes Stephen a long time to make the words. It's very slow working with his computer. So I turned him down, Stephen Hawking. I said no, and it's an interesting thing because at that time, ending grad school, remarkably, |
| 2:04.7 | I was a hot property on the job market. |
| 2:07.6 | And the real reason why I was a hot property is because nothing interesting was happening in physics at the time. |
| 2:14.2 | And you could be a hot property just on the basis of promise, not on the basis of any accomplishment. |
| 2:19.5 | So I was getting job offers right and left. I had convinced people that I had promise. |
| 2:23.9 | And ultimately, where I decided to go was to MIT. |
... |
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