why was sean carroll denied tenure

For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. Also, they were all really busy and tired. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. That's just not my thing. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? But, you know, the contingencies of history. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. More than just valid. Another bad planning on my part. Yes, I think so. And guess what? Too Much Information? - Inside Higher Ed Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. That's not data. 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. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University 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? Like, several of them. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. Would that be on that level? The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. Let's just say that. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. 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. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. Moving on after tenure denial. This is an example of it. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. All while I was in Santa Barbara. Tenure denials - The Philosophers' Cocoon You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. I chose wrongly again. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. They are clearly different in some sense. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. So, the technology is always there. 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 . Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. And he says, "Yes, everything the Santa Fe Institute has ever done counts." 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. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. If I want to be self-critical, that was a mistake. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? That's what supervenience means. We'll have to see. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. Sean Carroll. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? Yeah, no, good. These were people who were at my level. He wrote wonderful popular books. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. 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. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. You know, students are very different. ", "2014 National Convention Los Angeles Freedom From Religion Foundation", "Responding to Sean Carroll: What If There Had Been a Camera at the Resurrection? SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. It's not a good or a bad kind. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. I will confess the error of my ways. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? That's not by itself bad. 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. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. They actually have gotten some great results. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. I think people like me should have an easier time. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. My response to him was, "No thanks." You really have to make a case. 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. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. Where was string theory, and how much was it on your radar when you were thinking about graduate school and the kinds of things you might pursue for thesis research? A Surprise Point of Agreement With Sean Carroll So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. They're like, what is a theory? People know who you are. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? So, I realized right from the start, I would not be able to do it at all if I assume that the audience didn't understand anything about equations, if I was not allowed to use equations. It doesn't lead to new technology. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. 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. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . I've only lived my life once, and who knows? All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. Did you connect with your father later in life? But it's less important for a postdoc hire. All of them had the same idea, that the amount of matter in the universe acts as a break on the expansion rate of the universe. 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." So, I want to do something else. Planning, not my forte. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. Well, it's true. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. Be prolific and reliable. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. What you would guess is the universe is expanding, and how fast it's expanding is related to that amount of density of the universe in a very particular way. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. Why Lorgia Garca Pea Was Denied Tenure at Harvard [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. I remember that. Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub And now I know it. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. 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. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. Some of them are excellent, but it's almost by accident that they appear to be excellent. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. No, quite the opposite. That just didn't happen. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. You have enough room to get it right. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. 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. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. 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. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. What Is a Tenured Employee? Benefits of Earning This Status So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. All of the ability I have to give talks, and anything like that, has come from working at it. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. 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. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. 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. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too.

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