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

But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. 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. That's a tough thing to do. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. So, I was on the ground floor in terms of what the observational people. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. You don't get paid for doing it. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. Having said that, they're still really annoying. Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. 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." [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. Oh, kinds of physics. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. Who did you work with? Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. So, that was definitely an option. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. Oh, there aren't any? There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. So, I went to a large public school. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. The book talks about wide range of topics such as submicroscopic components of the universe, whether human existence can have meaning without Godand everything between the two. That's how philosophy goes. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. So, I'm a big believer in the disciplines, but it would be at least fun to experiment with the idea of a university that just hired really good people. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. I don't think so. Let's get back to Villanova. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. We're kind of out of that. I was a theorist. And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. I do firmly believe that. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. I don't want to say anything against them. It might have been by K.C. 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. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." I mean, I could do it. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. I didn't really want to live there. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. You get dangerous. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. We used Wald, and it was tough. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? So, I did eventually get a postdoc. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. Social media, Instagram. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. 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. I've forgotten almost all of it, so I'm not sure it was the best use of my time. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. The rest of the field needs to care. [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. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. Chicago is a little bit in between. I think it was like $800 million. 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. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. I chose wrongly again. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. No, not really. It was -- I don't know. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). Graduate school is a different thing. 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. Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. What was your thought process along those lines? Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. We certainly never worked together. Is there something wrong about it?" 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. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. So, they weren't looking for the signs for that. 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. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. This happens quite often. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. Move on with it. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. I'm close enough. 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 . Not especially, no. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. 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. That's just not my thing. Some people are just crackpots. I think it's bad in the following way. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. They chew you up and spit you out. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. So, they knew everything that I had done. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. This is an example of it. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. So, and it's good to be positive about the great things about science and academia and so forth, but then you can be blindsided. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. We hit it off immediately. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. 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. So, I want to do something else. This is something that's respectable.". I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. 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. What am I going to do? Like, that's a huge thing. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. I don't know how public knowledge this is. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? I think, to some extent, yes. There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. Did you connect with your father later in life? They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." Not so they could do it. People know who you are. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. [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. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. Recent Books. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. In a sense, I hope not. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. I think that's the right way to put it. And I knew that. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. People didn't take him seriously. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. 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? If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. If I could get a million people buy my books, I'd be a really best-selling author. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. It's just really, really hard." Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. Absolutely brilliant course. That's the case I tried to make. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . So, I think it can't be overemphasized the extent to which the hard detailed work of theoretical physics is done with pencil and paper, and equations, and pictures, little drawings and so forth, but the ideas come from hanging out with people. Maybe going back to Plato. I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. Onondaga County. Get on with your life. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . 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. 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. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. One of them was a joke because one of them was a Xerox copy of my quantum field theory final exam that Sidney Coleman had graded and really given me a hard time. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. You get different answers from different people. So, he was an enormous help to me, but it's not like there were twenty other people who were doing the same kind of thing, and you hang out and have lunch and go to parties and talk about Feynman diagrams. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. 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. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. Okay? I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. We'll measure it." I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. It's all worth it in the end. I don't think it has anything to do with what's more important, or fundamental, or exciting, or better science, but there is a certain kind of discipline that you learn in learning physics, and a certain bag of tricks and intellectual guiding stars that you pick up that are very, very helpful. We don't know the theory of everything. Wildly enthusiastic reception. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. That's okay. So many ideas I want to get on paper. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. I remember, on the one hand, I did it and I sat down thinking it was really bad and I didn't do very well. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. 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. Everyone knows about that. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. But it was kind of overwhelming. I decided to turn them down, mostly because I thought I could do better. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. 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. What was he working on when you first met him? 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. 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, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. Let's put it that way. Do you have any good plans for a book?" Sean, as a public intellectual with your primary identity being a scientist but with tremendous facility in the humanities and philosophy and thinking about politics, in the humanities -- there's a lot of understanding of schools of thought, of intellectual tradition, that is not nearly as prominent as it is in the sciences. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. This didn't shut up the theorists. 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. No, not really. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. The South Pole telescope is his baby. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. In many ways, it was a great book. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty.