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. No, you're completely correct. 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. We'll figure it out. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". 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.". So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? 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. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. 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. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? 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. Since I wrote But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. 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? Thank goodness. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. I do remember, you're given some feedback after that midterm evaluation, and the director of the Enrico Fermi Institute said, "You've really got to not just write review papers, but high impact original research papers." But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. I remember -- who was I talking to? When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. I wrote a big review article about it. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. He was a very senior guy. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. It was fine. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. So, the technology is always there. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. I was there. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? 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. So, thank you so much. When I went to MIT, it was even worse. Right. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. Why did you do that?" As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. Be prolific and reliable. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. What mattered was learning the material. But research professor is a faculty member. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. 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. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. A video of the debate can be seen here. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." 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. Okay? Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. 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. 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. So, that appeared in my book as a vignette. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. This happens quite often. More than one. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. That's just the system. Is this where you want to be long-term, or is it possible that an entirely new opportunity could come along that could compel you that maybe this is what you should pursue next? Or other things. They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. 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. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. By reputation only. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. Again, I was wrong. Sean Carroll was denied tenure at University of Chicago, but he - Quora That's right. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. That was always true. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? So many ideas I want to get on paper. So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. You have enough room to get it right. 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. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. There's a bunch. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? You really have to make a case. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. I put an "s" on both of them. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. There's an equation you can point to. 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? Tenure denial, seven years later | Small Pond Science Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. 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. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. We wrote a lot of papers together. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. I'll be back. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Not especially, no. And of course, it just helps you in thinking and logic, right? So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. 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. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? No preparation needed from me. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. Look at the dynamics of the universe and figure out how much matter there must be in there and compare that to what you would guess the amount of matter should be. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? Powerful people from all over the place go there. 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. 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. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. 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. "The University of Georgia has been . This is what I do. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. 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. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. Graduate school is a different thing. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. 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. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. That was my talk. 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. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. They're not in the job of making me feel good. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. I had it. I think so. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." Sean Carroll's new book argues quantum physics leads to many worlds That's my question. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. Sean M. Carroll - Wikipedia So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. You know, I wish I knew. Just get to know people. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? If the case centers around a well-known university, it can become a publicized battle, and the results aren't always positive for the individual who was denied. "What major research universities care about is research. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. He had to learn it. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. It's my personal choice. Now, you might ask, who cares? In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? They decide to do physics for a living. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? It has not. Absolutely the same person.". You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. . They chew you up and spit you out. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. 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. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. Well, that's interesting. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. You don't get paid for doing it. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. Now, look, if I'm being objective, maybe this dramatically decreases my chances of having a paper that makes a big impact, because I'm not writing papers that other people are already focused on. He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. 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. Tell us a bit about your new book . Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? And Chicago was somewhere in between. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. Euclid's laws work pretty well. Why tenure is so important yet rare for Black professors Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. Get on with your life. [20] In 2014, he was awarded the Andrew Gemant Award by the American Institute of Physics for "significant contributions to the cultural, artistic or humanistic dimension of physics". You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. Yeah. So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. The two advantages I can think of are, number one, at that time, it's a very specific time, late '80s, early '90s -- specific in the sense that both particle physics and astronomy were in a lull. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. Who did you work with? Another paper, another paper, another paper. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. Onondaga County. What you should do is, if you're a new faculty member in a department, within the first month of being there, you should have had coffee or lunch with every faculty member. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." Stephen Morrow is his name. 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. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. Tenure Denied Hannah-Jones | Simple Justice I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? Six months is a very short period of time. I like her a lot. I do this over and over again. That was my first choice. I mean, I'm glad that people want to physicists, but there's no physicist shortage out there. Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. The four of us wrote a paper. 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. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? Happy to be breathing the air. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard.
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