why was sean carroll denied tenure

I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? [14] He has also published a YouTube video series entitled "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" which provides physics instruction at a popular-science level but with equations and a mathematical basis, rather than mere analogy. So, again, I foolishly said yes. It's just like being a professor. Sean Carroll. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. The unhappy result of preferring less candor is the loss we all feel now.". I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. 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. So, you can think of throwing a ball up into the air, and it goes up, but it goes up ever more slowly, because the Earth's gravitational pull is pulling it down. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. It will never be the largest. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. 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. It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. Very, very much. 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. We wrote a lot of papers together. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. 4. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. We hit it off immediately. You get dangerous. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. I did everything right. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. So, let's get off the tenure thing. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." Where was string theory, and how much was it on your radar when you were thinking about graduate school and the kinds of things you might pursue for thesis research? What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure I'm an atheist. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. 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. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. The world has changed a lot. 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. What It's Like to Be Denied Tenure - chronicle.com It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. 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? They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. Stephen Morrow is his name. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like that. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. And Chicago was somewhere in between. If you take a calculus class, you learned all these techniques, like the product rule, and what to do with polynomials. I'm not going to really worry about it. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . Let's go back to the happier place of science. So, in that sense, technology just hasn't had a lot to say because we haven't been making a lot of discoveries, so we don't need to worry about that. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. 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. They do not teach either. I don't know. Why did Sean Carroll write 'From Eternity to Here'? Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. Why Sean Carroll is wrong - Quantum Moxie It has not. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. 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. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. She could pinpoint it there. 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. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. No, not really. I was less good of a fit there. As a postdoc at MIT, was that just an opportunity to do another paper, and another paper, and another paper, or structurally, did you do work in a different way as a result of not being in a thesis-oriented graduate program? His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? That's just the system. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? We knew he's going pass." One is you do get a halfway evaluation. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. 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. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. 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. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. Now, next year, I'll get a job. 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. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. [53][third-party source needed]. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. I made that choice consciously. I talked about topological defects, and it was good work, solid work, but they were honestly -- and this is the sort of weird thing -- they said, after I gave the talk and everything, "Look, everyone individually likes you, but no one is sure where you belong." It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. I had an astronomy degree, and I'd hung out with cosmologists, so I knew the buzzwords and everything, but I hadn't read the latest papers. Sean Carroll's Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 That's a huge effect on people's lives. That's why I said, "To first approximation." But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. 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. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? Evolutionary biology also gives you that. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. 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. 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. And who knows, it all worked out okay, but this sort of background, floating, invisible knowledge is really, really important, and was never there for me. 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. 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. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. 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. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. People had learned things, but it was very slow. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. So, that was one big thing. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. No, you're completely correct. Then you've come to the right place. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. And that's the only thing you do. 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. Like, where's the energy coming from? Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. 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.". That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. At the time, . So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. Since the answer is not clear, I decide to do what is the most fun. And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. 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. 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. They actually have gotten some great results. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? 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. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. Tenure Denial Sparks Protests at Chicago-Kent College of Law; Legal Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department.

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