When there are scores of principals leaving, positions staying open for years and talented new hires being denied tenure, it is a sign of a power vacuum (or disinterest) at the top. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. [20] In 2014, he was awarded the Andrew Gemant Award by the American Institute of Physics for "significant contributions to the cultural, artistic or humanistic dimension of physics". A lot of them, even, who write books, they don't like it, because there's all this work I've got to do. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. This is a weird list. They saw the writing on the wall. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. And that's not bad or cynical. This is something that's respectable.". But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. Let's put it that way. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. I think it was like $800 million. The original typescript is available. What was he working on when you first met him? Russell Wilson Wanted Sean Payton To Replace Pete Carroll With Seahawks? I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. These are all very, very hard questions. So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want . Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? 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. Absolutely brilliant course. And they said, "Sure!" You're looking under the lamppost. What mattered was learning the material. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. . Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? You know the answer to that." So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. It doesn't always work. Physics does give you that. 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. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. Sean Carroll on Twitter Maybe that's not fair. My mom was tickled. 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. Well, that's not an experimental discovery. What to do if you're facing tenure denial | Small Pond Science In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. I think I got this wrong once. 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. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. I had it. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. 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. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? 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. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. I think it's more that people don't care. 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. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. But I don't know what started it. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? The four of us wrote a paper. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. Since I wrote At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. Again, I was wrong. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. I think people like me should have an easier time. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. I chose wrongly again. That's it. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. It was a big hit to. 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. I will get water while you're doing that. I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. I'm not sure. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? So, I want to do something else. At the time, . it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. I don't always succeed. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. 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. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. You should apply." That's just not my thing. Thank you for inviting me on. Sean Carroll, Theoretical Physicist | Heritage Project It was fine. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. It's not overturning all of physics. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. It's funny that you mention law school. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. 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. 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. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. Everyone knows about that. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. 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. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. Not so they could do it. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. Yeah, it absolutely is great. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. So, I said, well, how do you do that? So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? 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 . We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. Sean Carroll's new book argues quantum physics leads to many worlds You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." Onondaga County. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." That's what supervenience means. 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? Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . It doesn't need to be confined to a region. That was always temporary. Now, you might ask, who cares? So, we made a bet. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. 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? We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. It sounded very believable. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. [32][33][34] Some of his work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity and the arrow of time. And part of it was because no one told me. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. (The same years I was battling, several very capable people I had known in grad school at Berkeley were also denied tenure, possibly caught in the cutbacks at the time, possibly victims of a wave . I think it's gone by now. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. 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's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." There were two that were especially good. I think that's the right way to put it. My response to him was, "No thanks." At Los Alamos, yes. It doesn't lead to new technology. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. Why is that? But it's not what I do research on. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. I really wanted to move that forward. If you've been so many years past your PhD, or you're so old, either you're hired with tenure, or you're not hired on the faculty. In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. 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? Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. Why did Sean Carroll not get tenure? - Steadyprintshop.com So, I did eventually get a postdoc. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. They come in different varieties. I was still thought to be a desirable property. And you mean not just in physics. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. 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. People still do it. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. George didn't know the stuff. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." They chew you up and spit you out. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? MIT was a weird place in various ways. What are the Different Reasons for Being Denied Tenure? [53][third-party source needed]. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. I think, now, as wonderful as Villanova was, and I can rhapsodize about what a great experience I had there, but it's nothing like going to a major, top notch university, again, just because of the other students who are around you. I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. That's a huge effect on people's lives. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. Ten of those men and no women were successful. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." It's an honor. Tenure denial, seven years later. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. That's all it is. Young universities ditch the tenure system. 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. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. 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. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. Further Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University So, I made the point that he should judge me not on my absolute amount of knowledge, but by how far I had come since the days he taught me quantum field theory. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. I do this over and over again. Whereas there are multiple stories of people with PhDs in physics doing wonderful work in biology. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". Get on with your life. Why don't people think that way? 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? He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. 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. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. We could discover what the dark matter is. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? They seem unnatural to us. My teacher, who was a wonderful guy, thinks about it a second and goes, "Did you ever think about how really hard it is to teach people things?" It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. Planning, not my forte. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . Too Much Information? - Inside Higher Ed Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. We had problem sets that we graded. That was not on my radar. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. 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, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. 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. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space.

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