Johns Hopkins

The first time I stepped onto a university campus was in junior high school, when I attended an awards ceremony for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. Spending a lot of time on college campuses was not something that I grew up in. The SMPY is a longitudinal study that looks for kids who do well on standardized math tests and encourages them to take the SATs at a young age. I scored as pretty good, but not good enough to be worth following up. My award was a slim volume on analytic geometry, which was nice.

The campus made an impression. It was elegant and evocative in a way that was new to me. Students and professors talk about ideas in grand architecture, buildings stuffed with books and laboratories. I assumed that was what they were talking about. It was magical. I was committed to going to university, getting a PhD, and becoming a theoretical physicist, even though I had no idea what that meant. The campus atmosphere redoubled my conviction that this was the right path for me.

I am very excited to announce that I will become a professor. We will be moving from Los Angeles to Baltimore this summer, and I will be taking up a position as a professor of natural philosophy. She can continue writing about science and culture from any location.

There is an explanation to the title. There is a special category for Homewood Professors. There aren't many of them. Some are traditional academics like Joseph Silk, while others are not. The official documentation states that a person of high scholarly, professional, or artistic distinction should be a Homewood Professor. Too late!

It is a permanent faculty job, teaching, students, grant proposals, the whole nine yards. The position of Homewood Professors is not tenured, but it is better because it floats above any specific department lines. If I insisted, they could think about a tenure process. I wanted to do it for symbolic reasons. I decided not to bother once the ins and outs were explained.

My time will be split between the departments of physics and astronomy. I will teach one course per year in each department. I will teach a first-year seminar on the physics of democracy and an upper-level seminar on topics in the philosophy of physics this fall. The arrow of time, philosophy of cosmology, and the foundations of quantum mechanics are all subject to change. Let me know if you're interested in applying because I'll be hiring grad students and postdocs in both departments.

Both departments have been named after William Miller. Bill Miller, who was an undergraduate philosophy major at Hopkins, made generous donations to both philosophy and physics. He donated to and served as board chair for the Santa Fe Institute. Both departments are very high-quality, and physics and astronomy includes friends and colleagues like Adam Riess, and David Kaplan. These gifts will allow us to grow in ways that are very exciting.

One benefit of being a Homewood Professor is that you can choose what you will be a professor of, and I asked that it be Natural Philosophy, which is reminiscent of the days before science and philosophy split into distinct disciplines. I resisted the temptation to go with a Latin version. This is something that makes this opportunity special. I have always been interested in reaching out to other people and have always been in the field of physics and philosophy. There was tension with what I was supposed to be doing. The academic insistence on putting everyone into a silo and encouraging them to stay there doesn't fit with my preferences.

For the first time in my life, I want to do things that are my job. The case may be that it is not tolerated. The folks at JHU want me to build connections between different departments, and they want me to keep up with the academic work, as well as keep up with the podcasts and books. It's a good fit since I want to do that myself.

I have nothing bad to say about my time at Caltech. I have a lot of affection for my colleagues and especially for the many brilliant students who I have been privileged to interact with along the way. I can't wait to dive in. I want to pursue ideas in astronomy, quantum mechanics, complexity, statistical mechanics, emergence, information, democracy, and other areas. Maybe we will start a seminar series that brings people together. Maybe it will become a Center of some kind. I might write academic papers on moral philosophy. Who knows? It is all allowed. Can't ask for more than that.