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

So, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. That was always true. Hard to do in practice, but in principle, maybe you could do it. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. That would be great. Maybe going back to Plato. Not to mention, socialization. Yes, well that's true. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. Three, tell people about it. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. 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. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Based on my experience as an Instructor at a major research university and now tenure-track faculty at a major public university, I would say that all of his major points are . I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. So, that would happen. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. I'm very happy with that. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about. It's my personal choice. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. In many ways, it was a great book. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something. 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. So, an obvious question arises. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. A video of the debate can be seen here. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? I just want to say. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. 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. 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. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. 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. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. Planning, not my forte. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. Now, you might ask, who cares? You know, there's a lot we don't understand. That's not data. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. 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. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. That was my first choice. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. But I don't remember what it was. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. When I went to MIT, it was even worse. No, not really. Yeah. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. 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. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. 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." 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. 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. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. I remember that. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. "[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. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. Oh, yeah, entirely. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. 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. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . Again, uniformly, I was horrible. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. It's a junior faculty job. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. It has not. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? 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. It would be bad. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. We might have met at a cosmology conference. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. Cole. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. So, that's what he would do. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. We hit it off immediately. It was -- I don't know. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. I just think they're wrong. [53][third-party source needed]. 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. And he said, "Yes, sure." I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. 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. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. 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? Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. 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? Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad.