why was sean carroll denied tenure

I was on the advanced track, and so forth. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. Why, for example, did Sean M. Carroll [1], write From Eternity to Here? And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? 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. Like, that's a huge thing. 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. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. This is what I do. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. Absolutely brilliant course. Or, I could say, "Screw it." 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. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. We were promised the mass of the electron would be calculated by now. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. 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. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. So, I did, and they became very popular. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. 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? (The same years I was battling, several very capable people I had known in grad school at Berkeley were also denied tenure, possibly caught in the cutbacks at the time, possibly victims of a wave . I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. I thought I knew what I was doing. 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, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Well, one ramification of that is technological. I will confess the error of my ways. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. What am I going to do? But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. 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. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. Russell Wilson denies he wanted Pete Carroll and John Schneider fired Washington was just a delight. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? 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. . By reputation only. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. Maybe going back to Plato. I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. There's a few, but it's a small number. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. You've got to find the intersection. You nerded out entirely. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. www.nysun.com You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing 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. I just want to say. He is not at all ashamed to tell you that and explains things sometimes in his talks about cosmology by reference to his idea about God's existence. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. Maybe it's them. So, I was behind already. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. No one told me. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. The rest of the field needs to care. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. More than just valid. I mean, I could do it. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. Yeah, so actually, I should back up a little bit, because like I said, at Harvard, there were no string theorists. And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. It was -- I don't know. 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. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. We'll have to see. You don't necessarily need to do all the goals this year. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. I love people who are just so passionate about their little specialty. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. We hit it off immediately. Let's start with the research first. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. So, I think it's a big difference. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. On Carroll's view the universe begins to exist at the Big Bang only in the sense that a yardstick begins to exist at the first inch. Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. So, that was true in high school. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. So, George was randomly assigned to me. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? Very, very important. That's what really makes me feel successful. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. You should not let w be less than minus one." But I'm classified as a physicist. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. But, I mean, I have no shortage of papers I want to write in theoretical physics. No sensible person doubted they would happen. When there are scores of principals leaving, positions staying open for years and talented new hires being denied tenure, it is a sign of a power vacuum (or disinterest) at the top. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. It had gotten a little stuck. No, quite the opposite. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. What Is Time? | Professor Sean Carroll Explains Presentism and So, I made the point that he should judge me not on my absolute amount of knowledge, but by how far I had come since the days he taught me quantum field theory. Princeton University Press. So, I said, well, how do you do that? I would have gladly gone to some distant university. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. Mark Hoffman was his name. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. Russell Wilson reportedly asked Seahawks to fire Pete Carroll for Sean That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. Why did Sean Carroll not get tenure? - Steadyprintshop.com When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. I do firmly believe that. I lucked into it, once again. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. Why do people get denied tenure? That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. Melville, NY 11747 You get one quarter off from teaching every year. But other people have various ways of getting to the .

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