why was sean carroll denied tenurestation road surgery email address

why was sean carroll denied tenure

I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. But he didn't know me in high school. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. I do firmly believe that. I think it's bad in the following way. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. 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. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. Again, I was wrong. You get different answers from different people. We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. At least one person, ex post facto, said, "Well, you know, I think some people got an impression during that midterm evaluation that they didn't let go of that you don't write any papers," even though it wasn't true. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? I'm not making this up. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. 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 . So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. 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.". 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. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. It's not just a platitude. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. 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. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. So, like I said, we were for a long time in observational astronomy trying to understand how much stuff there is in the universe, how much matter there is. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. 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. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. I've done it. I just want to say. I think, they're businesspeople. Author admin Reading 4 min Views 5 Published by 2022. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. The Hubble constant is famously related to the dark energy, because it's the current value of the Hubble constant where dark energy is just taking over. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. And I've guessed. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. 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. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. And part of it was because no one told me. I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. You know, I wish I knew. They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. He had to learn it. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. I think we only collaborated on two papers. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. That's when I have the most fun. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. I think so. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? So, that was a benefit. Well, that's interesting. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. 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, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. 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. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. 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. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. 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. Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. It would be bad. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. It doesn't lead to new technology. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. 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. So, all of those things. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. 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. This didn't shut up the theorists. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. . So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. 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." So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. No, no, I kind of like it here. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. He was a blessing, helping me out. 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 long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. The production quality was very bad, and the green screen didn't work very well. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. You really, really need scientists or scholars who care enough about academia to help organize it, and help it work, and start centers and institutes, and blaze new trails for departments. Someone said it. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. That's the case I tried to make. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? But still, it was a very, very exciting time. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. So, I did, and they became very popular. I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. It was a summer school in Italy. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. I made that choice consciously. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. Suite 110 I think that's the right way to put it. Now, the academic titles. Some people love it. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. So, an obvious question arises. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. 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. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. I think both grandfathers worked for U.S. Steel. Maybe going back to Plato. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. So, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. I taught what was called a big picture course. Very, very important. One, drive research forward. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. And I said, "But I did do that." Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. 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. But there were postdocs. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". Stephen Morrow is his name. But you're good at math. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . They seem unnatural to us. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. 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. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. His recent posting on the matter (at . Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. Oh, there aren't any? The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. Planning, not my forte. 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. When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. And I love it when they're interested in outreach or activism or whatever, but I say, "Look, if you want to do that as a professional physicist, you've got to prioritize getting a job as a professional physicist." +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. 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. I like the idea of debate. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. [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. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. That's a very hard question. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. So, that's how I started working with Alan. Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. I was less good of a fit there. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. Came up with a good idea. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. You don't get paid for doing it. It was a huge success. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. I did various things. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. Absolutely brilliant course. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. Washington was just a delight. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. 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. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. And, you know, in other ways, Einstein, Schrdinger, some of the most wonderful people in the history of physics, Boltsman, were broad and did write things for the public, and cared about philosophy, and things like that. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. I think I did not really feel that, honestly. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. Sean Carroll. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. How do you understand all of these things? These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? MIT was a weird place in various ways. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. There are so many people at Chicago. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. Yeah. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? It was very long. It was a tough decision, but I made it. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? I was there. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. 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?

Lehigh Valley Railroad Map, Articles W