why was sean carroll denied tenure why was sean carroll denied tenure

Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. 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. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. I do try my best to be objective. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. You can't get a non-tenured job. At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. 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. I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. And the answer is, to most people, there is. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." Faculty are used to disappointment. That's a very hard question. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. So, again, I foolishly said yes. Okay? 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." You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. My response to him was, "No thanks." They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. Then, I'm happy to admit, if someone says, "Oh, you have to do a podcast interview," it's like, ah, I don't want to do this now. They chew you up and spit you out. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. Princeton University Press. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. Yeah, absolutely. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. I'll never be Joe Rogan or Marc Maron, or whatever. 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. Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. At the time, . His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. 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. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." That was always true. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. [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". Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. I'm not sure. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. I love it. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. But still, it was a very, very exciting time. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. These were people who were at my level. I did not succeed in that goal. I was there. 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. It's my personal choice. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. It's an honor. 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? CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. 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. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. I think I got this wrong once. Being on the debate team, trying to work through different attitudes, back and forth. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. What about minus 1.1? And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. There's no delay on the line. They saw the writing on the wall. Let me just fix the lighting over here before I become a total silhouette. I had an astronomy degree, and I'd hung out with cosmologists, so I knew the buzzwords and everything, but I hadn't read the latest papers. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. Yeah, it absolutely is great. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. I was a good teacher. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. If you actually take a scientific attitude toward the promotion of science, you can study what kinds of things work, and what kinds of approaches are most effective. It wasn't really clear. Oh, kinds of physics. 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. Alright, Sean. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. Thank you for inviting me on. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. But they're really doing things that are physics. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. It seems that when you finally got to Caltech, it all clicked for you. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Again, I was wrong. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. You're not going to get tenure. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." The COBE satellite that was launched on a pretty shoestring budget at the time, and eventually found the CMB anisotropies, that was the second most complicated thing NASA had ever put in orbit after the Hubble space telescope. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. 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. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. The system has benefited them. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. I get that all the time. No one does that. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. I've done it. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. Here is my thought process. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. We used Wald, and it was tough. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. Were your family's sensibilities working class or more middle class, would you say? I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. I just think they're wrong. 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. Well, one ramification of that is technological. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. So, that was definitely an option. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. She could pinpoint it there. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Learn new things about the world. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? [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. It was a big hit to. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. I do a lot of outreach, but if you look closely at what I do, it's all trying to generate new ideas and make arguments. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. I've got work and it's going well. Well, how would you know? But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. George didn't know the stuff. He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. I think we only collaborated on two papers. . [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. They actually have gotten some great results. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. That was great, a great experience. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. There are evil people out there. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. I'm enough of a particle physicist. What sparked that interest in you? It's still pretty young. She never went to college. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. 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. But mostly, I hope it was a clear and easy to read book, and it was the first major book to appear soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. You got a full scholarship there, of course. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. I do long podcasts, between an hour and two hours for every episode. 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. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. I had the best thesis committee ever. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. It's not just a platitude. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. Absolutely the same person.". So, let's get off the tenure thing. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . That's what I am. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. But part of the utopia that we don't live in, that I would like to live in, would be people who are trying to make intellectual contributions [should] be judged on the contributions and less on the format in which they were presented. What are the odds? I like her a lot. I had the results. 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? I don't interact with it that strongly personally. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. Everyone loved it, I won a teaching award. MIT was a weird place in various ways. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. That was my first choice. We knew he's going pass." But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. There were hints of it. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. Carroll has a B.S. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. That's why I said, "To first approximation." I'd like to start first with your parents. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. Now, next year, I'll get a job. And I said, "But I did do that." The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. I just drifted away very, very gradually. And I said, "Yeah, sure." I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. This is probably 2000. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. 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. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. You really have to make a case.