why was sean carroll denied tenure

Some of them might be. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. So, that was a benefit. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. That's it. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. 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. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . Carroll, S.B. 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. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. I will." As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. George didn't know the stuff. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. 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. It was -- I don't know. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. Benefits of tenure. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. And he's like, "Sure." Moving-tenure-denial - Chemical & Engineering News Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. 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. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. There's still fundamental questions. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. Martin White. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. What sparked that interest in you? So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. They were all graduate students at the time. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. He was reaching out and doing a public outreach thing, but also really investigating ideas. That was not on my radar. You nerded out entirely. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. 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. I really wanted to move that forward. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. Sean M. Carroll - Wikipedia People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. 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. That's all it is. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. 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. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. 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? But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. Melville, NY 11747 So, I think it can't be overemphasized the extent to which the hard detailed work of theoretical physics is done with pencil and paper, and equations, and pictures, little drawings and so forth, but the ideas come from hanging out with people. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. You can be surprised. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. As a result, the fact that I was interdisciplinary in various ways, not just within cosmology and relativity and particle physics, but I taught a class in the humanities. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. So, I was done in 20 minutes. Three, tell people about it. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." So, I would like to write that as a scientist. And the answer is, to most people, there is. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. What It's Like to Be Denied Tenure - chronicle.com So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. That's a huge effect on people's lives. It's still pretty young. 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. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. 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. I like the idea of debate. Having said that, they're still really annoying. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. I got the Packard Fellowship. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. And that's the only thing you do. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. Measure all the matter in the universe. 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. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. A Surprise Point of Agreement With Sean Carroll Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. Some Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University I think it's part of a continuum. These are all very, very hard questions. That was always temporary. I do firmly believe that. Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. 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. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. What we said is, "Oh, yeah, it's catastrophically wrong. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. 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. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? Alright, Sean. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. I just want to say. 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? They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. Why Are Professors Denied Tenure? - YouTube Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. 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. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. 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. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. You know when someone wants to ask a question. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. College Park, MD 20740 Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed But then, the thing is, I did. 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. Like, several of them. 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. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." I had the best thesis committee ever. 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. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. 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. To get started, would you please tell me your current titles and institutional affiliations? So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. 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." I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. A video of the debate can be seen here. 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. 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? Having said that, the slight footnote is you open yourself up, if you are a physicist who talks about other things, to people saying, "Stick to physics." And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. This is the advice I tell my students. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? 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." If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. 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. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one. When I went to Harvard, there were almost zero string theorists there. So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. 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. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . They appear, but once every few months, but not every episode. www.nysun.com I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. Yes, well that's true. That includes me. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. So, George was randomly assigned to me. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. Whereas, my graduate students, I do work, they do work, but I do other things as well. As much as I love those people, I should have gone somewhere else and really shocked my system a little bit. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. Recent Books. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. What you would guess is the universe is expanding, and how fast it's expanding is related to that amount of density of the universe in a very particular way. They're not in the job of making me feel good. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. 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. I do think that people get things into their heads and just won't undo them. 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. Sean on Twitter: "Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at - reddit He was a blessing, helping me out. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. What were the most interesting topics at that time? An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. That's a very hard question. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. We don't care what you do with it." To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. They're rare. 4. I just drifted away very, very gradually. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. I pretend that they're separate. So, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then a few looking forward. There are so many, and it's very easy for me to admit that I suffer from confirmation biases, but it's very hard for me to tell you which ones they are, because we all each individually think that we are perfectly well-calibrating ourselves against our biases, otherwise we would change them in some way.

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