Thread by @seanmcarroll

Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at the end of the next academic year. Caltech is great, and I've known wonderful people there. They would be happy for me to stay (as far as I know!), but this specific position is no longer a good fit for me, so I've decided to move on.

I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch.

And writing, talking, podcasting, etc. And still an external professor at Santa Fe. Things will be pretty much unchanged from an outside-world perspective. But it does mean I'm not taking on students or postdocs at the moment, sorry about that.

When I moved to Caltech, I had three goals: continue to do high-quality theoretical physics; expand my research into totally other areas (philosophy, biology, complex systems...); and make a bigger impact in the public sphere (writing, speaking, etc).

I'd give myself grades of B+, C-, and A in those three areas, respectively (relative to my personal expectations). It's time to get more serious about the interdisciplinary-research thing, which is extremely important to me.

I'm old enough to know what I want to do, and I'm eager to expand my professional-level intellectual work into new areas. Exciting!