why was sean carroll denied tenure

Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. That just didn't happen. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. It's my personal choice. 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? Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? 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. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. I explained, and he said he had read this paper that he thought was interesting, by Richard Gott, on time machines, close time-like curves in gravity. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. I'm close enough. There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. I have no problems with that. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? I think new faculty should get wooden desks. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. Were your family's sensibilities working class or more middle class, would you say? An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." Sean Carroll: I'm not in a super firm position, cause I don't have tenure at Caltech, so, but I don't care either. Now, you might ask, who cares? You get different answers from different people. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. It might have been by K.C. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? So, I wrote very short chapters. I think it's part of a continuum. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. I really do think that in some sense, the amount that a human being is formed and shaped, as a human being, not as a scientist, is greater when they're an undergraduate than when they're a graduate. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. 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? Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? I was still thought to be a desirable property. It's just really, really hard." I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. 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, I was behind already. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. I think, they're businesspeople. And the answer is, to most people, there is. Now, the academic titles. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. 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 had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. There's no delay on the line. It is remarkable. I do try my best to be objective. I like her a lot. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. It's still pretty young. I don't think so. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. And I said, "Yeah, sure." You know, I wish I knew. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. But it's worked pretty well for me. Moving on after tenure denial. Not to mention, socialization. I didn't really want to live there. "The University of Georgia has been . (2020) A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.Princeton University Press. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. 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. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. The book talks about wide range of topics such as submicroscopic components of the universe, whether human existence can have meaning without Godand everything between the two. But you're good at math. That's how philosophy goes. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. 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.". 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? To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. So, I think it's a big difference. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. It's all worth it in the end. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. So, the technology is always there. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. Let's put it that way. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. All of which is to say, once I got to Caltech, I did start working in broadening myself, but it was slow, and it wasn't my job. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. Did you get any question like that? There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. I'll be back. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. Yeah, no, good. I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. That's a recognized thing that's going on. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. A video of the debate can be seen here. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. I don't know. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. So, I recognize that. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. It sounded very believable. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. No, not really. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. 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. I love people who are just so passionate about their little specialty. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. They chew you up and spit you out. I'm curious if your more recent interests in politics are directly a reflection of what we've seen in science and public policy with regard to the pandemic. Carroll, S.B. The original typescript is available. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. Powerful people from all over the place go there. He's the best graduate student I've ever had. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. 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.

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