why was sean carroll denied tenure why was sean carroll denied tenure

But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. I got a lot of books on astronomy. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. But part of the utopia that we don't live in, that I would like to live in, would be people who are trying to make intellectual contributions [should] be judged on the contributions and less on the format in which they were presented. But maybe it could. I was there. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. It might have been by K.C. From the outside looking in, you're on record saying that your natural environment for working in theoretical physics is a pen and a pad, and your career as a podcaster, your comfort zone in the digital medium, from the outside looking in, I've been thinking, is there somebody who was better positioned than you to weather the past ten months of social distancing, right? It doesn't lead to new technology. [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. They're not in the job of making me feel good. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. But he was very clear. They are . So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. So, that was definitely an option. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. So, the technology is always there. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. We wrote a lot of papers together. Okay? I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. Recent Books. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. Or there was. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. I was taking Fortran. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. Not a 100% expectation. Right. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. Look at the dynamics of the universe and figure out how much matter there must be in there and compare that to what you would guess the amount of matter should be. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. I'm close enough. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. That's what I am. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? You know, students are very different. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. I will confess the error of my ways. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. Completely blindsided. But it's worked pretty well for me. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. I've never cared. He had to learn it. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. It was very small. You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. This is an example of it. 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? Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? The book talks about wide range of topics such as submicroscopic components of the universe, whether human existence can have meaning without Godand everything between the two. We don't know the theory of everything. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. 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? There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. This could be great. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. I chose wrongly again. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. But you were. Who knows? Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. I didn't do what I wanted to do. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. So, all of those things. I have a lot of graduate students. It would have been better for me. Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. There's no delay on the line. I had never quite -- maybe even today, I have still not quite appreciated how important bringing in grant money is to academia. So, I did, and they became very popular. Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. Now, the KITP. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? So, that was with other graduate students. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. He invited a few of us. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. Who was on your thesis committee? I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. And that's the only thing you do. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. They're rare. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. So, that was one big thing. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." Institute for Theoretical Physics. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. So, I want to do something else. Another paper, another paper, another paper. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. Suite 110 So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. Sean Carroll. College Park, MD 20740 I have zero interest in whether someone is doing a hot topic thing for a faculty hire, exactly like you said. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. You're not going to get tenure. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. This is the advice I tell my students. The whole bit. They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. You were starting to do that. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? Measure all the matter in the universe. So, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. So, my three years at Santa Barbara, every single year, I thought I'll just get a faculty job this year, and my employability plummeted. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. 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. 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? Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. At the time, . So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. Field. You should apply." There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? But they're going to give me money, and who cares? You got a full scholarship there, of course. 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. Melville, NY 11747 I remember that. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. No, not really. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. What are the odds? I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. I think it's gone by now. She said, "John is right, and I was also right. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. I didn't stress about that. They basically admitted that. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. Some of them might be. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. It was a tough decision, but I made it. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. But they're really doing things that are physics. I was still thought to be a desirable property. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. "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 . So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. I really leaned into that. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. They're like, what is a theory? [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. [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. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. I was in Sidney's office all the time. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? It's just like being a professor. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. It's challenging. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. So, I kind of talked with my friends. You know when someone wants to ask a question.