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

You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? 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. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. Thank goodness. That just didn't happen. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" 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. And I answered it. I think that there -- I'm not sure there's a net advantage or disadvantage, but there were advantages. That would be great. So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? So, all of those things. So, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. I had the results. / Miscellany. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. So, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then a few looking forward. Well, that's not an experimental discovery. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . 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. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. And my response to them is what we do, those of us who are interested in the deepest questions about the nature of reality, whether they're physicists, or philosophers, or whoever, like I said before, we're not going to cure cancer. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. Yeah. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. Yes, well that's true. People had learned things, but it was very slow. 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. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Based on my experience as an Instructor at a major research university and now tenure-track faculty at a major public university, I would say that all of his major points are . There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. And he's like, "Sure." And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. 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. Planning, not my forte. Young people. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. I do firmly believe that. In some extent, it didn't. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. This is something that's respectable.". Theorists never get this job. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. Came up with a good idea. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. You know when someone wants to ask a question. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. But this is a huge metaphysical assumption that underlies this debate and divides us. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. 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 . A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? No, not really. 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. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? We just knew we couldn't afford it. 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. Dutton, $29. 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 might have been by K.C. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. There was no internet back then. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in astronomy, and both for weird, historical reasons. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." Since I've been ten years old, how about that? There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. We don't know what to do with this." For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. I can do it, and it is fun. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. So, that was a benefit. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. Playing the game, writing the papers that got highly cited, being in the mainstream, and doing things that everyone agreed were interesting, which I did to a certain extent but not all the way when I was in Chicago. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". 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. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. 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. They're not exactly the same activity, but they're part of the same landscape. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. And now I know it. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. I had the best thesis committee ever. Now, the KITP. I didn't really want to live there. 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. 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. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. 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. A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. But I'm classified as a physicist. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". . I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. It just came out of the blue. Not especially, no. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. Carroll, S.B. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. 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. Because they pay for your tuition. No sensible person doubted they would happen. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. I think so. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. I have a short attention span. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. I haven't given it up yet. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? The rest of the field needs to care. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" And at least a year passed. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. It's not overturning all of physics. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? 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. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. So, I kind of talked with my friends. 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. One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. Would that be on that level? His most-cited work, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due To New Gravitational Physics?" One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) 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. It was very long. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." Good. 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. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. So, we made a bet. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. What was he working on when you first met him? I was still thought to be a desirable property. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. I took the early universe [class] from Alan. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. This is a non-tenured position. The actual job requirements -- a big part of it, the part that I take most seriously, and care most about -- is advising graduate students. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. In many ways, it was a great book. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. 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. But they're really doing things that are physics. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. Or other things. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. What could I do? In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. 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. I like the idea of debate. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. 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." Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. We certainly never worked together. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. Because you've been at it long enough now, what have been some of the most efficacious strategies that you've found to join those two difficulties? Benefits of tenure. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. 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. I like teaching a lot. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. 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. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. 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. The thing that people are looking for, the experimental effort these days, and for very good reason, is aimed at things that we think are plausibly true.