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

Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. She could pinpoint it there. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. You nerded out entirely. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? But research professor is a faculty member. 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. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. 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. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. So, I was behind already. I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. This is so exciting because you are one of the best interviewers out there, so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. Do you have any good plans for a book?" It moved away. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. A stylistic clash, I imagine. We wrote a lot of papers together. It was not a very strict Catholic school. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. [37] Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. Okay? [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? The discovery was announced in July. Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. So, I was done in 20 minutes. So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." Who was on your thesis committee? Or other things. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. His most-cited work, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due To New Gravitational Physics?" Right. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. In a podcast in 2018, Sam Harris engaged with Carroll. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. I'd like to start first with your parents. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. 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. It just came out of the blue. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. The dynamo, the Biermann battery, the inverse cascade, magnetic helicity, plasma effects, all of these things that are kind of hard for my purely theoretical physicist heart to really wrap my mind around. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. 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. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. Very, very much. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. In many ways, it was a great book. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. Because they pay for your tuition. 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. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. People are sitting around with little aperitifs, or whatever, late at night. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. Well, most people got tenure. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. You know the answer to that." [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. I was still thought to be a desirable property. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. That's not what I do for a living. So, I wrote very short chapters. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. So, you can think of throwing a ball up into the air, and it goes up, but it goes up ever more slowly, because the Earth's gravitational pull is pulling it down. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. [32][33][34] Some of his work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity and the arrow of time. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. There's a few, but it's a small number. No one told me. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. But it was kind of overwhelming. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. I will." So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. So, I said, well, how do you do that? You're just too old for that. You really, really need scientists or scholars who care enough about academia to help organize it, and help it work, and start centers and institutes, and blaze new trails for departments. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. We made a new prediction for the microwave background, which was very interesting. 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. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? That's okay. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. Hopefully it'll work out. There's an equation you can point to. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. Let me ask you that question specifically on the topic of religion. There are so many people at Chicago. Physics does give you that. Who hasn't written one, really? Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. Again, stuff that has not been that useful to me, but I just loved it so much, as well as philosophy and literature classes at Harvard. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? It's at least possible. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. It is January 4th, 2021. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. Yeah. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. Why don't people think that way? [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. I think it's part of a continuum. So, like I said, I really love topology. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. I didn't do what I wanted to do. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. So, they said, "Here's what we'll do. 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. [14] He has also published a YouTube video series entitled "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" which provides physics instruction at a popular-science level but with equations and a mathematical basis, rather than mere analogy. Wildly enthusiastic reception. If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) Yes, I think so. 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. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. We knew he's going pass." But you're good at math. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. Yes, well that's true. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. Is it the perfect situation? And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion", published in September 2022.[15]. I don't want to say anything against them. We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. I didn't stress about that. Also, they were all really busy and tired. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. We don't understand economics or politics. Really, really great guy. 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. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. So, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. 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. I taught a couple of courses -- not courses, but like guest lectures when I was in high school. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. I think we only collaborated on two papers. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. 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. That's my question. Thank you for inviting me on. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. Social media, Instagram. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? He offered 13 pieces of . I like the idea of debate. Oh, yeah. I really wanted to move that forward. Suite 110 That one and a follow up to that. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. I think to first approximation, no. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. I'll just put them on the internet. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. It's all worth it in the end. Just get to know people. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. 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. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. It was fine. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. 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. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. 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. 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. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. Euclid's laws work pretty well. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. The whole bit. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. And part of it was because no one told me. 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." Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. I put an "s" on both of them. But you were. But there's an enormous influence put on your view of reality by all of these pre-existing propositions that you think are probably true. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. I remember -- who was I talking to? Not even jump back into it but keep it up. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. Came up with a good idea. There's no delay on the line. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. I think, to some extent, yes. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. And I've guessed. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity.