why was sean carroll denied tenure

Let's sit and think about this seriously." Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. 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? A derivative is the slope of something. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. So, I said, well, how do you do that? No one told me. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. When I told Ed Guinan, my undergraduate advisor, that I had George Field as an advisor, he said, "Oh, you got lucky." I just don't want to do that anymore. And I didn't. So, I said that, and she goes, "Well, propose that as a book. But I don't remember what it was. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. 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. Then, the other big one was, again, I think the constant lesson as I'm saying all these words out loud is how bad my judgment has been about guiding my own academic career. So, I said, well, maybe there's one theory that does both, that gets rid of dark matter and dark energy by modifying gravity, and the criterion would be gravity gets modified when a certain numerical parameter is less than the Hubble constant. He is a man of above-average stature. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure. I was there. Absolutely. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. George didn't know the stuff. It is January 4th, 2021. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. I put an "s" on both of them. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Well, that's interesting. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . 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. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. Alright, Sean. 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. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure Yeah, no, good. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. There's good physics reasons. 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. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. This could be great. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. And the answer is, to most people, there is. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. 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. This is a non-tenured position. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. [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. Sean Carroll on Twitter She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. But that's okay. I think, they're businesspeople. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. That's fine. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. 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. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. Yes, I think so. You know, I wish I knew. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . Sean Payton denies report of concerns with unnamed member of Broncos It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. By reputation only. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. Everyone knew that was real. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. We've already established that. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. It will never be the largest. I think it was like $800 million. It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. 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, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, because he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. No one does that. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. That's why I said, "To first approximation." In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. 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. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. So the bad news is - Sean Carroll Well, one ramification of that is technological. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . 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. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. 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. The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. Princeton University Press. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. I'm an atheist. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. 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]. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. 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. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. But you were. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. [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. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. 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. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. 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. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. I chose wrongly again. Mark Hoffman was his name. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. She's very, very good. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. And part of it was because no one told me. Sean, for my last question, looking forward, I want to reflect on your educational trajectory, and the very uncertain path from graduate school to postdoc, to postdoc to the University of Chicago. So, I kind of talked with my friends. I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. We could discover what the dark matter is. An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. This is December 1997. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. So, I was done in 20 minutes. Audio, in one form or another, is here to stay. What are the odds? So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. You should apply." So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. Why did you do that?" If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. They seem unnatural to us. That's a huge effect on people's lives. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. . What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? Also, they were all really busy and tired. So, I used it for my own purposes. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. So, that was true in high school. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? They have a certain way of doing things. 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. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. 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.