why was sean carroll denied tenure

Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? Why don't people think that way? Why do people get denied tenure? When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" "The University of Georgia has been . More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. When I went to graduate school at Harvard, of course, it was graduate school, but I could tell that the undergraduate environment was entirely different. No, no. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. I've got work and it's going well. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. When there are scores of principals leaving, positions staying open for years and talented new hires being denied tenure, it is a sign of a power vacuum (or disinterest) at the top. . I can just do what I want. Some of them might be. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. I'm not sure. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. What am I going to do? Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. I didn't do what I wanted to do. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. It just came out of the blue. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. And he said, "Absolutely. What are the odds? They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? I have zero interest in whether someone is doing a hot topic thing for a faculty hire, exactly like you said. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. These are all very, very hard questions. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. So many ideas I want to get on paper. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. There's always some institutional resistance. I have a lot of graduate students. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. That one and a follow up to that. Young people. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. This could be great. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? George and Terry team-taught a course on early universe cosmology using the new book by Kolb and [Michael] Turner that had just come out, because Terry was Rocky Kolb's graduate student at Chicago. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. So, the paper that I wrote is called The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes. Supervenience is this idea in philosophy that one level depends on another level in a certain way and supervenes on the lower level. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. I wrote a big review article about it. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? It doesn't lead to new technology. Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. Do you have any good plans for a book?" It's a messy thing. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. That's absolutely true. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. It's at least possible. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. The COBE satellite that was launched on a pretty shoestring budget at the time, and eventually found the CMB anisotropies, that was the second most complicated thing NASA had ever put in orbit after the Hubble space telescope. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. But there were postdocs. Yes, but it's not a very big one. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. My response to him was, "No thanks." In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . That's not by itself bad. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? Let's put it that way. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Also, assistant professor, right? What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" What was he working on when you first met him? [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Carroll, S.B. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. He offered 13 pieces of . So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. On Carroll's view the universe begins to exist at the Big Bang only in the sense that a yardstick begins to exist at the first inch. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. One, drive research forward. I thought I knew what I was doing. And part of it was because no one told me. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. I'm curious if your more recent interests in politics are directly a reflection of what we've seen in science and public policy with regard to the pandemic. The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. No, not really. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? I said, "Yeah, don't worry. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. That's how philosophy goes. It's just like being a professor. Or there was. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. Don't have "a bad year.". It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. Again, I was wrong over and over again. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. Yeah. So, that appeared in my book as a vignette. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. This is a weird list. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. Oh, kinds of physics. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. The system has benefited them. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. I like her a lot. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. These were all live possibilities. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." I decided to turn them down, mostly because I thought I could do better. We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. People know who you are. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. : Saturday 22 March 2014 2:30:00 am", "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine", "Sean Carroll Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship", "Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast Sean Carroll", "Sean Carroll Bridges Spacetime between Science, Hollywood and the Public | American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Meet the professor who helped put the science into Avengers: Endgame", "Sean Carroll the physicist who taught the Avengers all about time", "Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel", "Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time", "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang", "Science and Religion Can't Be Reconciled: Why I won't take money from the Templeton Foundation", "Science & God: Will Biology, Astronomy, Physics Rule Out Existence Of Deity? The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. Hopefully it'll work out. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. I'm close enough. Again, I was wrong. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. I get that all the time. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. This is December 1997. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. Oh, yeah. So, that would happen. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? Tenure denial, seven years later. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. So, that was with other graduate students. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. The discussion with Stuart Bartlett was no exception. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. Cole. Here is my thought process. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . Oh, there aren't any? [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society?

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