why was sean carroll denied tenure

Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." But maybe it could. 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. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. The idea -- the emails or responses that make me the happiest are when someone says, you know, "I used to love physics, and I was turned off by it by like a bad course in high school, and you have reignited my passion for it." I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. www.nysun.com My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. It was July 4th. At Los Alamos, yes. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. So, two things. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. That's how philosophy goes. David, my pleasure. 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. 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. 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. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. What are the odds? So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. 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. I remember that. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. It's not a good or a bad kind. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. He invited a few of us. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. So far so good. They're not in the job of making me feel good. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. I just drifted away very, very gradually. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. . I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. 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. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. He was doing intellectual work in the process of public outreach, which is really, really hard, and he was just a master at it as well as being an extremely accomplished planetary scientist, and working with NASA and so forth. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. Everyone knew that was real. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. Carroll, S.B. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. So, we talked about different possibilities. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. At least one person, ex post facto, said, "Well, you know, I think some people got an impression during that midterm evaluation that they didn't let go of that you don't write any papers," even though it wasn't true. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . You should apply." There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. But he didn't know me in high school. There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. Did you get any question like that? 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? But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. 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 had the results. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. 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. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. There was no internet back then. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. Let's put it that way. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? 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. So, it was really just a great place. A derivative is the slope of something. At Harvard, it's the opposite. Sean Carroll's Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 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. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. So, George was randomly assigned to me. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. She never went to college. We'll measure it." I was less good of a fit there. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? 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. Happy to be breathing the air. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. 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. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. Russell Wilson reportedly asked Seahawks to fire Pete Carroll for Sean So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. I'm not discounting me. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. Why tenure is so important yet rare for Black professors 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 . I'll be back. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. So, I went to a large public school. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. 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. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. There's still fundamental questions. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. Maybe it's them. Then, the other big one was, again, I think the constant lesson as I'm saying all these words out loud is how bad my judgment has been about guiding my own academic career. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple In many ways, it was a great book. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. Or, I could say, "Screw it." 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 members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits . 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."

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