why was sean carroll denied tenure

Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. So, my other graduate school colleagues, Brian had gone to the University of Arizona, Ian Dell'Antonio, who was another friend of mine, went to, I think, Haverford. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. It is January 4th, 2021. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" I got the Packard Fellowship. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" And I said, "Well, I thought about it." Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. They just don't care. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. 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. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. And he says, "Yes, everything the Santa Fe Institute has ever done counts." Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. So, if, five or ten years from now, the sort of things that excite me do not include cutting edge theoretical physics, then so be it. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. 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. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. And we started talking, and it was great. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - scientific-know-how.com Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. They are clearly different in some sense. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. Spread the word. 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. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. If it's more, then it has a positive curvature. They didn't know. I think there are plenty of physicists. Too Much Information? - Inside Higher Ed [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. All of the ability I have to give talks, and anything like that, has come from working at it. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. Well, how would you know? So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. And I didn't. You're old. Maybe going back to Plato. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. I like teaching a lot. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. The Russell Wilson drama continues, now almost one full year removed from the trade that sent him from the Seahawks to the Broncos. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. I'm an atheist. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. It's a lot of work if you do it right. 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. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. So, the technology is always there. It's my personal choice. I think it's more that people don't care. A lot of people focus on the fact that he was so good at reaching out to broad audiences, in an almost unprecedented way, that they forget that he was really a profound thinker as well. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. 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. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . 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? The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. So, it was really just a great place. 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. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? We don't understand economics or politics. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. He had to learn it. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. He's supposed to answer the questions." I literally got it yesterday on the internet. www.nysun.com Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. You were hired with the expectation that you would get tenure. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. So, there's three quarters in an academic year. There's always exceptions to that. 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 it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. I think, to some extent, yes. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. 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. 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. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. I'm close enough. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. 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? Like, crazily successful. WRITER E Jean Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump in 2019 claiming he tarnished her reputation in his response to her sexual assault allegations against him . So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. 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. Okay? 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. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. You've got to find the intersection. I didn't really want to live there. And this time, first I had to do it all by myself, but because I was again foolishly ambitious, I typed up all the lecture notes, so equations and everything, before each lecture, Xeroxed them and handed them out. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. : Saturday 22 March 2014 2:30:00 am", "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine", "Sean Carroll Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship", "Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast Sean Carroll", "Sean Carroll Bridges Spacetime between Science, Hollywood and the Public | American Association for the Advancement of Science", "Meet the professor who helped put the science into Avengers: Endgame", "Sean Carroll the physicist who taught the Avengers all about time", "Sean Carroll Talks School Science and Time Travel", "Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time", "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang", "Science and Religion Can't Be Reconciled: Why I won't take money from the Templeton Foundation", "Science & God: Will Biology, Astronomy, Physics Rule Out Existence Of Deity?

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