why was sean carroll denied tenure

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? Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. That's just not my thing. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. I remember that. There's a bunch. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . So, we made a bet. No sensible person doubted they would happen. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. College Park, MD 20740 Who was on your thesis committee? But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? The whole bit. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. I was still thought to be a desirable property. No, no, I kind of like it here. There's an equation you can point to. 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. They do not teach either. 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. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. 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. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. 4. Since I wrote Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." 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. What mattered was learning the material. Why did you do that?" So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. And I didn't. 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." I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. 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. Carroll has a B.S. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. That's absolutely true. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. Literally, my office mate, while I was in graduate school, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating universe -- not while he was in graduate school, but later. / Miscellany. 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. Again, I was wrong over and over again. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. But that's okay. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. But within the course of a week -- coincidence problem -- Vikram Duvvuri, who was a graduate student in Chicago, knocked on my door, and said, "Has anyone ever thought of taking R and adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity and seeing what would happen?" So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics. Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. But there's an enormous influence put on your view of reality by all of these pre-existing propositions that you think are probably true. You have the equation. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. [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. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. There was no internet back then. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. Well, most people got tenure. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. You're not going to get tenure. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. It's the path to achieving tenure. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. Do you have any good plans for a book?" But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. @seanmcarroll . In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. Author admin Reading 4 min Views 5 Published by 2022. Having said that, the slight footnote is you open yourself up, if you are a physicist who talks about other things, to people saying, "Stick to physics." But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. I put an "s" on both of them. 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. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . Maybe not. 1 Physics Ellipse So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. 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. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." Yes, but it's not a very big one. Part of it was the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and the decision on the part of the field just to shut up and calculate more than to fret about the philosophical underpinnings. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. 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. I get that all the time. In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. 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." As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller 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. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. I'm not sure how much time passed. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. "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. They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. His most recent post on this subject claims to have put it all into a single equation. Here is my thought process. 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. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. 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. More than one. 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. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. We used Wald, and it was tough. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. 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. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. Physics does give you that. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. The tuition was right. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. Okay. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. 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? So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. But research professor is a faculty member. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. You can be surprised. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. So, they had clearly not talked to each other. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. But then, the thing is, I did. I don't know. I pretend that they're separate. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. Like, that's a huge thing. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? Did you connect with your father later in life? If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. I did various things. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. 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. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. 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. And guess what? It might have been by K.C. Maybe 1999, but I think 2000. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. But part of the utopia that we don't live in, that I would like to live in, would be people who are trying to make intellectual contributions [should] be judged on the contributions and less on the format in which they were presented. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. 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. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. 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 mean generally across the faculty. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." It was very small. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. This is a non-tenured position. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? I don't agree with what they do. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" So, there was the physics department, and the astronomy department, and there was also what's called the Enrico Fermi Institute, which was a research institute, but it was like half of the physics department and half of the astronomy department was in it. I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. All while I was in Santa Barbara. None of that at Chicago. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. I like the idea of debate. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule.

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