why was sean carroll denied tenure

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. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. It was very small. They just don't care. 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. 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. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. There were hints of it. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. It would be bad. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . He had to learn it. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. Being on the debate team, trying to work through different attitudes, back and forth. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. They're like, what is a theory? That's the message I received many, many times. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. I think I got this wrong once. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. This is probably 2000. Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? The statement added, "This failure is especially . 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. You've been around the block a few times. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. So, thank you so much. I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. I took almost all the physics classes. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. You don't really need to do much for those. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. In some extent, it didn't. 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. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. 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. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. So, it's incredibly liberating because I don't have to keep up with the billion other papers that people are writing in the hot topics. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? More than just valid. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. So, again, I'm going to -- Zoom, etc., podcasts are great. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. Yeah, no, good. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. And I answered it. But I'm classified as a physicist. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? I've only lived my life once, and who knows? 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? But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. So, he founded that. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. And they said, "Sure!" Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. It was a summer school in Italy. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. Measure all the matter in the universe. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. 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. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. So, I said, "Yes, I proposed a book and your wife rejected it.". What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. I really leaned into that. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. And the answer is, to most people, there is. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. Yes, I think so. 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. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? That's the job. They're rare. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. Let every student carve out a path of study. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. Carroll, S.B. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Some people love it. They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. It's challenging. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. . Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. Why don't people think that way? It's a junior faculty job. So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. 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. It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . It's not overturning all of physics. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. I'm not discounting me. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. You're looking under the lamppost. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. Yeah. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat.

How Much Is Laura Leboutillier Worth, Knickerbocker Country Club Initiation Fee, Magic Lessons Spoilers, 100% Commercial Financing Lenders, Nick Briz Eastern Florida State College, Articles W