In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." Sean, I'm so glad you raised the formative experience of your forensics team, because this is an unanswerable question, but it is very useful thematically as we continue the narrative. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. What sparked that interest in you? Then, the other big one was, again, I think the constant lesson as I'm saying all these words out loud is how bad my judgment has been about guiding my own academic career. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . Or, I could say, "Screw it." I just don't want to do that anymore. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it - Nature I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. She's very, very good.
Abdoulaye Doucoure came close to leaving Everton under Frank Lampard 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. The discovery was announced in July. How do you understand all of these things? I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. 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. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. 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. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. But the idea that there's any connection with what we do as professional scientists and these bigger questions about the nature of reality is just not one that modern physicists have. One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." So, that was one big thing. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. I taught what was called a big picture course. 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. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them.
Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. 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? People shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, you know, there's zero chance my dean would go for you now that you got denied tenure.". My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. 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. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. Again, I had great people at MIT. It moved away. You're not going to get tenure.
Sean on Twitter: "Personal news: I'll be leaving Caltech at - reddit Do you go to the economics department or the history department? We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. 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?" Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. It was hard to figure out what the options were. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. 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? One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. It never occurred to me that it was impressive, and I realized that you do need to be something.
Sean Carroll's advice on How to get tunure | Physics Forums Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people.
Stephen Knight on Sean Carroll, Colin Wright, and the binary of sex They saw the writing on the wall. So, there was the physics department, and the astronomy department, and there was also what's called the Enrico Fermi Institute, which was a research institute, but it was like half of the physics department and half of the astronomy department was in it. I just think they're wrong. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? 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. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity.
Russell Wilson denies he wanted Pete Carroll and John Schneider fired But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. So, the technology is always there. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. 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. 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. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. . Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. Powerful people from all over the place go there. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works.
How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University - Sean Carroll College Park, MD 20740 What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound.
What Is Time? | Professor Sean Carroll Explains Presentism and Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. We just knew we couldn't afford it. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. I think, now, as wonderful as Villanova was, and I can rhapsodize about what a great experience I had there, but it's nothing like going to a major, top notch university, again, just because of the other students who are around you. This could be great. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. 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. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. Sean Carroll Family. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. 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. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. Okay. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. 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. 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." If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. It's just really, really hard." But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. Research professors are hired -- they're given a lot of freedom to do things, but there's a reason you're hired. When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. So, the idea that I could go there as a faculty member was very exciting to me. There's always some institutional resistance. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? And it was great. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. Even as late as my junior or senior year as undergraduates in college, when everyone knew that I wanted to go to graduate school and be a professor, or whatever, no one had told me that graduate students in physics got their tuition paid for by stipends or research assistantships or whatever. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? Yeah, I think that's right. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. So, you can think of throwing a ball up into the air, and it goes up, but it goes up ever more slowly, because the Earth's gravitational pull is pulling it down. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. Martin White. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. Physics does give you that. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. [54] In this public dialogue, they discussed the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. Recent Books. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. All these different things were the favorite model for the cosmologists. 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. Bob is a good friend of mine, and I love his textbook, but it's very different. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. They're not exactly the same activity, but they're part of the same landscape. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. 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. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. Maybe not. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. That's a recognized thing that's going on. 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. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. It is incredibly draining for me to do it. I love writing books so much. They chew you up and spit you out.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. Completely blindsided. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. 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. That was not on my radar. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. I really wanted to move that forward.
Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. That's not data. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. Thanks very much. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. Very, very important. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. It was fine. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? 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. I'll be back. You're old. The original typescript is available. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. Like, crazily successful. Another paper, another paper, another paper. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. 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. Part of it is what I alluded to earlier. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. Do you have any good plans for a book?" I'm enough of a particle physicist. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. 4. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. He used that to offer me a job, to pay my salary. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics.
What to do if you're facing tenure denial | Small Pond Science No, no. Mark Hoffman was his name. So, he founded that. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. 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. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before.