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

Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. College Park, MD 20740 I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. Some of them are excellent, but it's almost by accident that they appear to be excellent. And now I know it. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. / Miscellany. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. I explained, and he said he had read this paper that he thought was interesting, by Richard Gott, on time machines, close time-like curves in gravity. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . A derivative is the slope of something. Who hasn't written one, really? Not just that there are different approaches. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. 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. Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. These are all very, very hard questions. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics 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. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? All of the ability I have to give talks, and anything like that, has come from working at it. Let's just say that. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. So, I want to do something else. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. 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. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. Sean Carroll. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. 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. 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. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? I continued to do that when I got to MIT. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. So, that was definitely an option. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. Carroll, S.B. 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. Ten of those men and no women were successful. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. 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. 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. 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. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! So, I said, well, how do you do that? Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. So, that was true in high school. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. Let's put it that way. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. That's a different me. At Los Alamos, yes. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. You really have to make a case. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. Oh, yeah, entirely. 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. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. 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. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. I was a theorist. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. Well, most people got tenure. So, there was the physics department, and the astronomy department, and there was also what's called the Enrico Fermi Institute, which was a research institute, but it was like half of the physics department and half of the astronomy department was in it. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." 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. I taught a couple of courses -- not courses, but like guest lectures when I was in high school. But it's worked pretty well for me. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. That's why I said, "To first approximation." So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. Is this where you want to be long-term, or is it possible that an entirely new opportunity could come along that could compel you that maybe this is what you should pursue next? Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? And I wasn't working on either one of those. We've already established that. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Hopefully it'll work out. Go longer. 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. The unhappy result of preferring less candor is the loss we all feel now.". I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? 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. 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. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. What you should do is, if you're a new faculty member in a department, within the first month of being there, you should have had coffee or lunch with every faculty member. Remember, I applied there to go to undergraduate school there. Then, I'm happy to admit, if someone says, "Oh, you have to do a podcast interview," it's like, ah, I don't want to do this now. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. ", "Making Sense Podcast #124 In Search of Reality", "Alan Wallace and Sean Carroll on The Nature of Reality", "Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll, and Laura Mersini-Hougton debate the Big Bang and Creation Myths", "Episode 28: Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe Sean Carroll", "Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books", Oral history interview transcript with Sean Carroll on 4 January 2021, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, Video introduction to Sean Carroll's lectures "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sean_M._Carroll&oldid=1141102312. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. 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. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. I just want to say. So, I was still sort of judging where I could possibly go on the basis of what the tuition numbers were, even though, really, those are completely irrelevant. We should move into that era." So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. You're just too old for that. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. She never went to college. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. There were hints of it. 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 benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. He is not at all ashamed to tell you that and explains things sometimes in his talks about cosmology by reference to his idea about God's existence. 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? So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? 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. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. 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 . 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. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. 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. Social media, Instagram. 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. Advertising on podcasts is really effective compared to TV or radio or webpages. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." 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. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. They are clearly different in some sense. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. And who knows, it all worked out okay, but this sort of background, floating, invisible knowledge is really, really important, and was never there for me. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. I mean, I could do it. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? So, there's just too many people to talk to, really. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. His recent posting on the matter (at . Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. 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. ", "Is God a good theory? It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you.