why was sean carroll denied tenurewhy was sean carroll denied tenure

So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. 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? The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. Cole. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. 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 think it's part of a continuum. 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. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. 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. That's not what I do for a living. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. Not especially, no. 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. A stylistic clash, I imagine. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. Right. The statement added, "This failure is especially . But it was kind of overwhelming. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. 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? To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. It's just like being a professor. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. We don't know the theory of everything. Don't have "a bad year.". Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . That's just the system. I also started a new course, general relativity for undergraduates, which had not been taught before, and they loved it. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. A video of the debate can be seen here. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. I don't always succeed. There's nobody working on using insights from the foundation of quantum mechanics to help understand quantum gravity, or at least, very, very few people. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. It was -- I don't know. Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. 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. It worked for them, and they like it. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? [53][third-party source needed]. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. But the idea that there's any connection with what we do as professional scientists and these bigger questions about the nature of reality is just not one that modern physicists have. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. You're old. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. Everyone knows about that. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. 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 forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. 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 ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. It was a tough decision, but I made it. So, we talked about different possibilities. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. I really do think that in some sense, the amount that a human being is formed and shaped, as a human being, not as a scientist, is greater when they're an undergraduate than when they're a graduate. Very, very important. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. And I said, "But I did do that." Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. 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? January 2, 2023 11:30 am. 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. 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. "What major research universities care about is research. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. 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. Like, where's the energy coming from? So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. Oh, kinds of physics. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? 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 . 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 think new faculty should get wooden desks. I've got work and it's going well. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" The particle theory group was very heavily stringy. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. 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. We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. Sean M. Carroll - Wikipedia I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. And that's the only thing you do. 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. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? And I've guessed. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. So, that appeared in my book as a vignette. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? We could discover what the dark matter is. 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? Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. That's a very hard question. Well, that's not an experimental discovery. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? His recent posting on the matter (at . He was a blessing, helping me out. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. This happens quite often. I took almost all the physics classes. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. Maybe not. These were all live possibilities. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. My response to him was, "No thanks." But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. Faculty are used to disappointment. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. It's funny that you mention law school. Carroll, S.B. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. And I didn't. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. That's a tough thing to do. I'm not discounting me. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. Is there something wrong about it?" And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. The 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. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. 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. 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. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist | Heritage Project Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? 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. We certainly never worked together. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. But you were. It's funny when that happens. Again, I had great people at MIT. Well, how would you know? His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. Tenure Denied Hannah-Jones | Simple Justice We did not give them nearly enough time to catch their breath and synthesize things. She could pinpoint it there. You know, I wish I knew. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. We don't know what to do with this." He is a man of above-average stature. I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. So, I used it for my own purposes. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. 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?" In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. 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. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - scientific-know-how.com 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? Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. So the bad news is - Sean Carroll It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. The rest of the field needs to care. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. I really leaned into that. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. At the end of the five-year term, they ask all the Packard fellows to come to the meeting and give little talks on what they did. Like, that's a huge thing. I'm an atheist. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. 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. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . What's so great about right now? Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. 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. And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. We'll figure it out. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. It was true that as you looked at larger and larger scales in the universe, you saw more and more matter, not just on an absolute scale, but also relative to what you needed to see. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. And he says, "Yes, everything the Santa Fe Institute has ever done counts." This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . Who hasn't written one, really? 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. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. 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. I love people who are just so passionate about their little specialty. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. That's okay. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. Let's get back to Villanova. That's all it is. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. And that got some attention also. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I had this email from a woman who said, literally, when she was 12 years old, she was at some event, and she was there with her parents, and they happened to sit next to me at a table, and we talked about particle physics, and she wrote just after she got accepted to the PhD program at Oxford in particle physics, and she said it all started with that conversation. I got a lot of books on astronomy. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. Whereas the accelerated universe was a surprise. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously.