why was sean carroll denied tenure

If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. [32][33][34] Some of his work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity and the arrow of time. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. I wonder, in what ways, given the fact that you have this tremendous time spending with all these really smart people talking about all these great ideas, in what ways do you bring those ideas back to your science, back to the Caltech, back to the pen and paper? And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. People still do it. 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. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff. The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. 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. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. 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? I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." Yes, but it's not a very big one. They come in different varieties. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. 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. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. What was your thought process along those lines? All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. It was a big hit to. 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. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. The specific way in which that manifests itself is that when you try to work, or dabble, if you want to put it that way, in different areas, and there are people at your institution who are experts in those specific areas, they're going to judge you in comparison with the best people in your field, in whatever area you just wrote in. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. 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. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. At the time, . 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. The South Pole telescope is his baby. It was fine. They actually have gotten some great results. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. 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. I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? There's no delay on the line. Not just that there are different approaches. Certainly, no one academic in my family. Author admin Reading 4 min Views 5 Published by 2022. I talked about topological defects, and it was good work, solid work, but they were honestly -- and this is the sort of weird thing -- they said, after I gave the talk and everything, "Look, everyone individually likes you, but no one is sure where you belong." You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. I think we only collaborated on two papers. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. . So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? 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. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. Some of them are excellent, but it's almost by accident that they appear to be excellent. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. Alright, Sean. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. That was great, a great experience. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. So, here's another funny story. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. I was taking Fortran. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. Eric Adelberger and Chris Stubbs were there, who did these fifth force experiments. 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. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. I think to first approximation, no. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. [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". How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. I did various things. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. We could discover what the dark matter is. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. At Los Alamos, yes. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. 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. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. We'll have to see. 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. I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. So, taste matters. They chew you up and spit you out. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. And he said, "Yes, sure." 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 think that's the right way to put it. I'm not going to really worry about it. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? We'll measure it." I think I got this wrong once. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . But there's an enormous influence put on your view of reality by all of these pre-existing propositions that you think are probably true. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? 1 Physics Ellipse What sparked that interest in you? So, again, I foolishly said yes. It doesn't lead to new technology. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. That's just the system. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. Carroll, S.B. It's challenging. Sorry about that. We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." 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. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. Where was string theory, and how much was it on your radar when you were thinking about graduate school and the kinds of things you might pursue for thesis research? Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. I didn't really want to live there. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. I won't say a know-it-all attitude, because I don't necessarily think I knew it all, but I did think that I knew what was best for myself. 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. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. 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 I don't know what started it. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty.