That's not what I do for a living. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. 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. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God. So, that was definitely an option. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. Also, assistant professor, right? Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? 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. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. I think all three of those things are valid and important. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." 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. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. It was a big hit to. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. It was hard to figure out what the options were. We don't care what you do with it." So I'm hoping either I can land a new position (and have a few near-offer opportunities), get the appeal passed and the denial reversed, or ideally find a new position, have the appeal denied, take my institution to court . Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. ", "Making Sense Podcast #124 In Search of Reality", "Alan Wallace and Sean Carroll on The Nature of Reality", "Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll, and Laura Mersini-Hougton debate the Big Bang and Creation Myths", "Episode 28: Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe Sean Carroll", "Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books", Oral history interview transcript with Sean Carroll on 4 January 2021, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, Video introduction to Sean Carroll's lectures "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sean_M._Carroll&oldid=1141102312. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. You know, I wish I knew. So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. 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. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. So, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. People had learned things, but it was very slow. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. They just don't care. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. Yes. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. So, late 1997, Phil Lubin, who was an astronomy professor at Santa Barbara, organized a workshop at KITP on measuring cosmological parameters with the cosmic microwave background. 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. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. 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. Now, the academic titles. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. He was a blessing, helping me out. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. 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. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. It was certainly my closest contact with the Harvard physics department. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. When I went to graduate school at Harvard, of course, it was graduate school, but I could tell that the undergraduate environment was entirely different.
Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. 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.". Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market.
Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is Maybe not. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. I like her a lot. I wrote a big review article about it. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . So, George was randomly assigned to me. It's at least possible. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? But you're good at math. It seems that when you finally got to Caltech, it all clicked for you. He is a man of above-average stature. Then, you enter graduate school as more or less a fully formed person, and you learn to do science.
Sean M. Carroll - Wikipedia Tenure denials - The Philosophers' Cocoon So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. They decide to do physics for a living. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. I think people like me should have an easier time. You've got to find the intersection. That's the job. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? Sean, what work did you do at the ITP? One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary.
Oral History Interviews | Sean Carroll | American Institute of Physics For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. This is literally the words that I was told. Not especially, no.
A Surprise Point of Agreement With Sean Carroll We made a new prediction for the microwave background, which was very interesting. 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. It was very long. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. The tuition was right. Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. It was true that as you looked at larger and larger scales in the universe, you saw more and more matter, not just on an absolute scale, but also relative to what you needed to see. In retrospect, there's two big things. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. This happens quite often. More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. 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. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. In fact, the short shield solution, the solution that you get in general relativity for spherically symmetric matter distribution, is exactly the same in this new theory as it was in general relativity. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. 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. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. 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. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. I'm close enough. And that's what I'm going to do, one way or the other. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. And he said, "Absolutely. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. It's a junior faculty job. Now, you might ask, who cares? But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". You're not going to get tenure. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. Do you want to put them all in the same basket? But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. Sorry about that. I got a lot of books on astronomy. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic.
I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." They didn't even realize that I did these things, and they probably wouldn't care if they did. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Tenure denial, seven years later. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. So, that's what he would do. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me.
Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. So, they keep things at a certain level. 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. And it was a . Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. I sat in on all these classes on group theory, and differential geometry, and topology, and things like that. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost .
Sean Carroll on Twitter: "Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. So, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. 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. Did you do that self-consciously? You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. They need it written within six months so it can be published before the discovery is announced. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. No, no. And I said, "Yeah, sure." So, the technology is always there. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. He had to learn it. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". 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. But I loved it. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. So, the paper that I wrote is called The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes. Supervenience is this idea in philosophy that one level depends on another level in a certain way and supervenes on the lower level. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. Came up with a good idea. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. So, I want to do something else. People are sitting around with little aperitifs, or whatever, late at night. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. So, that's one important implication. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. Learn new things about the world. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit. [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy.