why was sean carroll denied tenure

why was sean carroll denied tenurecharleston, wv indictments 2022

The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. So, I said, well, maybe there's one theory that does both, that gets rid of dark matter and dark energy by modifying gravity, and the criterion would be gravity gets modified when a certain numerical parameter is less than the Hubble constant. I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. We're creeping up on it. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. So, I'm really quite excited about this. Physics does give you that. You were starting to do that. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? Sean, in your career as a mentor to graduate students, as you noted before, to the extent that you use your own experiences as a cautionary tale, how do you square the circle of instilling that love of science and pursuing what's most interesting to you within the constraints of there's a game that graduate students have to play in order to achieve professional success? I'm trying to finish a paper right now. 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. It was not a very strict Catholic school. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - Sohoplayhouselv.com We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. That's right. So, I try to judge what they're good at and tell them what I think the reality is. 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 want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. It's just really, really hard." So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . But research professor is a faculty member. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. I didn't really want to live there. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. 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. 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. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . We'll measure it." How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. Sean Carroll's advice on How to get tunure | Physics Forums Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? 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. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. 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. [37] So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. At the end of the five-year term, they ask all the Packard fellows to come to the meeting and give little talks on what they did. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. I do try my best to be objective. So, he was right, and I'm learning this as I study and try to write papers on complexity. Then, I wrote some papers with George, and also with Alan and Eddie at MIT. I haven't given it up yet. 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. They chew you up and spit you out. 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. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. So, I think it's a big difference. It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. He was a blessing, helping me out. 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?" So many ideas I want to get on paper. I'm not sure how much time passed. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. If I do get to just gripe, zero people at the University of Chicago gave me any indication that I was in trouble of not getting tenure. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . It's conceivable, but it's very, very rare. That's not data. Sean Carroll (Author of The Big Picture) - Goodreads In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. So, what might seem very important in one year, five years down the line, ten years down the line, wherever you are on the tenure clock, that might not be very important then. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. To me, the book is still the most profound way for one person to say ideas that are communicated to another one. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". It gets you a job in a philosophy department. I really wanted to move that forward. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. But I'm classified as a physicist. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. There's always exceptions to that. People had learned things, but it was very slow. I'm going to bail from the whole enterprise. 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. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. But there were postdocs. 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 . In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub There's a lot of inertia. Three, tell people about it. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. Just get to know people. Get on with your life. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. Who was on your thesis committee? I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. 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. Here is my thought process. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. So, let's get off the tenure thing. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. Onondaga County. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. So, that was definitely an option. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. Or, I could say, "Screw it." [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. 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. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. ", "Is God a good theory? I think we only collaborated on two papers. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. 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. It's okay to recommit to your academic goals, or to try something completely different. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. We could discover what the dark matter is. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. But he didn't know me in high school. Sean Carroll Family. And I said, "But I did do that." Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. Some people are just crackpots. 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. 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. And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. I just don't want to do that anymore. We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. Sean Carroll was denied tenure at University of Chicago, but he - Quora Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? 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 the bad news is. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. Stephen Knight on Sean Carroll, Colin Wright, and the binary of sex The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? 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. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. 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? It would have been better for me. Why did Sean Carroll not get tenure? - Steadyprintshop.com I wonder if in some ways you're truly old fashioned in the way that what we would call scientists today, in the 17th and 18th century, they called natural philosophers. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, because he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion. So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. "What major research universities care about is research. It's sort of the most important ideas there but expressed in a way which was hopefully a lot more approachable and user-friendly, and really with no ambition other than letting people learn the subject. There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. Absolutely. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. And he said, "Absolutely. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. So, that's one important implication. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. Sorry about that. It was -- I don't know. Tenure denial, seven years later | Small Pond Science Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. I'm not sure. I got a minor in physics, but if I had taken a course called Nuclear Physics Lab, then I would have gotten a physics bachelors degree also. It was a tough decision, but I made it. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. 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 was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. 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. In a sense, I hope not. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. 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. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. 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. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." 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. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. It will never be the largest. [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded.

You Dirty Rat, You Killed My Brother Original, What Are They Building On Crenshaw And Lomita Blvd, Do Wesleyans Believe In Eternal Security, Articles W