why was sean carroll denied tenure

So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. Oral History Interviews | Sean Carroll | American Institute of Physics But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. In many ways, it was a great book. What are the odds? It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. No, not really. So, I wrote very short chapters. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. That's a tough thing to do. The world has changed a lot. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. Two and a half years I've been doing it, and just like with the videos, my style and my presentation has been improving, I hope, over time. I think, to some extent, yes. What? Cosmologist Sean Carroll doesn't freak out when Darwin is doubted This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. And we started talking, and it was great. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. So, I'm very, very happy to have written that book. What's so great about right now? 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. As I was getting denied tenure, nobody suggested that tenure denial was . That's a different me. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. 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. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. I went on expeditions with the dinosaur hunters as a public outreach thing. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. That's all it is. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. 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. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. 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 want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. I really leaned into that. That was always true. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. No one told me. I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. Now, you might ask, who cares? You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. Absolutely. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. I think both grandfathers worked for U.S. Steel. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. No, not really. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. I love that, and they love my paper. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? However, because I am intentionally and dynamically moving into other areas, not just theoretical physics, I can totally use the podcast to educate myself. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. 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? Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. @seanmcarroll . 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. 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. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. I think it's bad in the following way. 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. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. You know, students are very different. 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. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. And he's like, "Sure." Then why are you wasting my time? Did you get any question like that? Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. So, there's just too many people to talk to, really. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. Thanks very much. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. Literally, my office mate, while I was in graduate school, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating universe -- not while he was in graduate school, but later. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. And that's not bad or cynical. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. 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? He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. Here is my thought process. So, I was invited to write one on levels of reality, whatever that means. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. 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. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. But that's okay. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. 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. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. I don't want that left out of the historical record. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. There's a few, but it's a small number. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. 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? I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So, that was with other graduate students. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. More than just valid. 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. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. 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. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. One of them was a joke because one of them was a Xerox copy of my quantum field theory final exam that Sidney Coleman had graded and really given me a hard time. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. 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? And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . So, I was on the ground floor in terms of what the observational people. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. Right. But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. This is an example of it. 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. Being on the debate team, trying to work through different attitudes, back and forth. Or, maybe I visited there, but just sort of unofficially. Sean Carroll on Twitter: "Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. You really have to make a case. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. Onondaga County. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. They come in different varieties. Was that the game plan from day one for you? And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. Because they pay for your tuition. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. There's an equation you can point to. Or a biochemist, right? I love it. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." You've been around the block a few times. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. What can I write down? I just don't want to do that anymore. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. No preparation needed from me. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. Planning, not my forte. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? I taught both undergraduate and graduate students. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. That was my talk. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. Remember, I applied there to go to undergraduate school there. This transcript is based on a tape-recorded interview deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. I do try my best to be objective. The unions were anathema. I can just do what I want. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. Okay. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. 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? Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. Well, how would you know? I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. I did not succeed in that goal. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. Spread the word. So, they keep things at a certain level. We'll have to see. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. But you were. I was ten years old. 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. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. Let's put it that way. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. What were the most interesting topics at that time? Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. You get dangerous. That's the case I tried to make. So, it's incredibly liberating because I don't have to keep up with the billion other papers that people are writing in the hot topics. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? I don't want to say anything against them. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. Princeton University Press. But you're good at math. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. Maybe going back to Plato. They're a little bit less intimidated. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. People still do it. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. I haven't given it up yet. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is.

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