why was sean carroll denied tenure

So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. They are . Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. . We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. There are so many people at Chicago. Another bad planning on my part. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. It's just like being a professor. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. 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. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. They are clearly different in some sense. This is something that's respectable.". If you found that information was lost in some down-to-Earth process -- I'm writing a paper that says you could possibly find that energy is not conserved, but it's a prediction of a very good theory, so it's not a crazy departure. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? But I loved it. The system has benefited them. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. That's how philosophy goes. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. Who was on your thesis committee? You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. 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. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. And Chicago was somewhere in between. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. This is probably 2000. The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. There's a few, but it's a small number. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. 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. [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. 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? So, let's get off the tenure thing. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. I got the Packard Fellowship. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. So, I was on the ground floor in terms of what the observational people. Should we let w be less than minus one?" Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. You're not going to get tenure. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. 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 . I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. We'll have to see. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. 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. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. 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." Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. I love writing books so much. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. And I knew that. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. 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. All while I was in Santa Barbara. It's a necessary thing but the current state of theoretical physicists is guessing. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. Chicago is a little bit in between. 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. 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. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. I've not really studied that literature carefully, but I've read some of it. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" I pretend that they're separate. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. Ten of those men and no women were successful. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. And he's like, "Sure." Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? Someone said it. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. And you mean not just in physics. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can't claim that 'consciousness gets any credit at all . But he was very clear. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. 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. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. That's a romance, that's not a reality. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. 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. 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. 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. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. 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. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. The discussion with Stuart Bartlett was no exception. So, he founded that. [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". And he said, "Absolutely. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. So, it was really just a great place. Like, ugh. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. +1 301.209.3100, 1305 Walt Whitman Road They actually have gotten some great results. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." He is a man of above-average stature. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism.

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