why was sean carroll denied tenure

I really wanted to move that forward. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. So, I was done in 20 minutes. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. What are the odds? Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. 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. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. What am I going to do? 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. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. One, drive research forward. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. Was that the game plan from day one for you? Recent Books. Further Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". Some of them might be. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. It doesn't always work. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. We don't know the theory of everything. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. I have no problems with that. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. What was he working on when you first met him? I don't want that left out of the historical record. That would be great. 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. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. 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'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. Sean Carroll (Author of The Big Picture) - Goodreads 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. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. 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." [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. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. They do not teach either. If you actually take a scientific attitude toward the promotion of science, you can study what kinds of things work, and what kinds of approaches are most effective. Some field needs to care. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. Carroll, S.B. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. I think it's more that people don't care. You really have to make a case. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. But, you know, the contingencies of history. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. We have not talked about supercomputers, or quantum computers. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. He offered 13 pieces of . I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. 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. So, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. Well, that's interesting. Sean Carroll on Twitter: "Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. Who hasn't written one, really? I just want to say. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. 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. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. 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. They just don't care. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" 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? But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. "The University of Georgia has been . It sounded very believable. They were all graduate students at the time. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. It was -- I don't know. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora 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. Do you have any good plans for a book?" As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. You know when someone wants to ask a question. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. So, two things. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. That's a romance, that's not a reality. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. So, we wrote a paper. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. Oh, yeah. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. So, that's how I started working with Alan. 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? It doesn't lead to new technology. I was there. I don't know. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. 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. The two advantages I can think of are, number one, at that time, it's a very specific time, late '80s, early '90s -- specific in the sense that both particle physics and astronomy were in a lull. I love it. 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. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . That was my talk. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? It was July 4th. So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. It's still pretty young. It is incredibly draining for me to do it. I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Otherwise, the obligations are the same. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. It is January 4th, 2021. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? There's good physics reasons. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. 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. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. Is there something wrong about it?" Or other things. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? We don't care what you do with it." Why did Sean Carroll not get tenure? - Steadyprintshop.com Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. Part of my finally, at last, successful attempt to be more serious on the philosophical side of things, I'm writing a bunch of invited papers for philosophy-edited volumes. Sean Carroll | Department of Biology | University of Maryland But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. That's the message I received many, many times. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. Cole. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. I do try my best to be objective. Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Suite 110 The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. But there definitely has been a shift. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. 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. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. MIT was a weird place in various ways. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? What should we do? So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. What Is a Tenured Employee? Benefits of Earning This Status That's just the system. But, you know, my standard is what is it that excites me at the moment? So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. But then, the thing is, I did. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. I don't always succeed. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. There were two that were especially good. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. No, no. The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. People are sitting around with little aperitifs, or whatever, late at night. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. I pretend that they're separate. 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. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. But I'm classified as a physicist. I'm an atheist. That's all it is. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. There's no delay on the line. 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. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. It's all worth it in the end. But still, it was a very, very exciting time. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit I know the field theory. Now, can I promise you that the benefit is worth the cost, and I wouldn't actually be better off just sitting down and spending all of my time thinking about that one thing? This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. I think, both, actually. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. Planning, not my forte. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. Let every student carve out a path of study. So, George was randomly assigned to me. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. Field. 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. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. 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? In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. And guess what? This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. You mean generally across the faculty. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. Sean Carroll Height. They're not in the job of making me feel good. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. Young people. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. 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. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth Really, really great guy. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. You don't get paid for doing it. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? 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, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online.

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