why was sean carroll denied tenure

We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. You can be surprised. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. Why do people get denied tenure? Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. So, an obvious question arises. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. I put an "s" on both of them. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. So, I did, and they became very popular. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. Sean Carroll's Mindscape - Wondery | Premium Podcasts I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. Carroll, S.B. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. It's just, you know, you have certain goals in life. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. And I didn't. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. 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. Because you've been at it long enough now, what have been some of the most efficacious strategies that you've found to join those two difficulties? Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. Like, I did it. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. Why tenure is so important yet rare for Black professors But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? What happens if tenure is denied? - Tracks-movie.com He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. And that got some attention also. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? I love writing books so much. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. 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. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. I remember -- who was I talking to? Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. It's difficult, yes. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. 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. Completely blindsided. Sean Carroll. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. I just don't want to do that anymore. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. The specific way in which that manifests itself is that when you try to work, or dabble, if you want to put it that way, in different areas, and there are people at your institution who are experts in those specific areas, they're going to judge you in comparison with the best people in your field, in whatever area you just wrote in. I think it's gone by now. I'm very happy with that. Yeah, absolutely. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. 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. 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. As far as that was concerned, that ship had sailed. Absolutely brilliant course. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. Cole. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." 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. 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. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. I like teaching a lot. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. The tuition was right. 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. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . A video of the debate can be seen here. This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. That would have been a very different conversation if I had. And we started talking, and it was great. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. It's funny that you mention law school. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). Who did you work with? In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. It wasn't really clear. The reason is -- I love Caltech. It is January 4th, 2021. Carroll, S.B. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. [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. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. Why Sean Carroll is wrong - Quantum Moxie It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. Hopefully it'll work out. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. This is a weird list. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. It was fine. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." It worked for them, and they like it. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. It was a huge success. From the outside looking in, you're on record saying that your natural environment for working in theoretical physics is a pen and a pad, and your career as a podcaster, your comfort zone in the digital medium, from the outside looking in, I've been thinking, is there somebody who was better positioned than you to weather the past ten months of social distancing, right? I didn't stress about that. 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. Absolutely. You got a full scholarship there, of course. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. I did not get into Harvard, and I sweet talked my way into the astronomy department at Harvard. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also.

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