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

It's an honor. Princeton University Press. 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. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. Right. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." 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? I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. There's an equation you can point to. I took almost all the physics classes. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. "What major research universities care about is research. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. 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. That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." I just drifted away very, very gradually. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . Were your family's sensibilities working class or more middle class, would you say? Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. 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. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? Would I be interested in working on it with him? Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. Whereas, my graduate students, I do work, they do work, but I do other things as well. 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. Another bad planning on my part. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . There were two that were especially good. Sean Carroll on free will. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. You really have to make a case. I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. Onondaga County. So, thank you so much. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. Like, where's the energy coming from? I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. Well, most people got tenure. Euclid's laws work pretty well. And it was a . 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. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. I just want to say. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. 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. I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. So, like I said, I really love topology. Let every student carve out a path of study. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. No, no. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. Not especially, no. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. 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." It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? Then why are you wasting my time? First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? 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. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? In some extent, it didn't. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So, again, I'm going to -- Zoom, etc., podcasts are great. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. I will confess the error of my ways. 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. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? 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? Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. Just get to know people. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. I did everything right. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? And you mean not just in physics. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? So, my three years at Santa Barbara, every single year, I thought I'll just get a faculty job this year, and my employability plummeted. I'm not discounting me. But that's okay. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. 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. And I said, "But I did do that." Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. I don't know how public knowledge this is. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. It's the path to achieving tenure. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. 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. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. But you're good at math. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. 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 . Did you do that self-consciously? That's not what I do for a living. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? Perhaps, to get back to an earlier comment about some of the things that are problematic about academic faculty positions, as you say, yes, sometimes there is a positive benefit to trends, but on the other hand, when you're establishing yourself for an academic career, that's a career that if all goes well will last for many, many decades where trends come and go. Benefits of tenure. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . Carroll, S.B. This is a non-tenured position. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". 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. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. ", "Is God a good theory? So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. It's a junior faculty job. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. So, I wrote very short chapters. Some people love it. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Thanks very much. 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. But anyway, I never really seriously tried to change advisors from having George Field as my advisor. 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? Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". They are . Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? Okay? Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. So, I used it for my own purposes. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. Yeah. 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. But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. So, every person who came, [every] graduate student, was assigned an advisor, a faculty member, to just sort of guide them through their early years. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. 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. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. So far so good. And they said, "Sure!" So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. Well, sorry, also one string theorist: Barton Zwiebach was there. At the time, . 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. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. And the answer is, to most people, there is. I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. 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. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. 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. [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." If you take a calculus class, you learned all these techniques, like the product rule, and what to do with polynomials. This is an example of it. So, here's another funny story. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. There's a few, but it's a small number. Washington was just a delight. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. I pretend that they're separate. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. But it's not what I do research on. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. I think so. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? There's a bunch. Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. It's still pretty young. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. I did various things. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. 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. 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. 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 asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" I've got work and it's going well. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. What could I do? Physicists have devised a dozen or two . I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. And he said, "Yes, sure." Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? Yeah, it absolutely is great. Tenure denial, seven years later. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. 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. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. That's all it is. Now, you want to say, well, how fast is it expanding now compared to what it used to be? Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. But you were. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. 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. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. That's the opposite. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. 1.12 Carroll's model ruled out on other grounds. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. They seem unnatural to us. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth.