There are so many people at Chicago. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. But it doesn't hurt. In fact, no one cited it at the time -- people are catching on now -- but it was on the arrow of time in cosmology and why entropy in the universe is smaller in the past than in the future. 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. www.nysun.com Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. And guess what? When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? They are clearly different in some sense. 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. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. I was ten years old. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. Princeton University Press. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. There's a sense in which the humanities and social sciences are more interchangeable. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. As I look from a galaxy to a cluster to large-scale structure, it goes up, and it goes up to .3, and it kind of stays at .3, even as I look at larger and larger things. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. 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. No, you're completely correct. There should be more places like it, more than there are, but it's no replacement for universities. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. Chicago horn is denied tenure - Slippedisc That was my talk. Why do people get denied tenure? His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. And it's not just me. Would I be interested in working on it with him? So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . So, that was a benefit. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. Sean M. Carroll - Wikipedia I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. I think, both, actually. Let's just say that. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? Don't have "a bad year.". No, not really. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. 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. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . More than one. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. The first super string revolution had happened around 1984. I made that choice consciously. The only person who both knows the physics well enough and writes fast enough to do that is you." 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. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. Whereas the accelerated universe was a surprise. Sean Carroll: Universe a 'tiny sliver' of all there is But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub 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 say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." So, taste matters. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. So, the technology is always there. Sean Carroll is a Harvard educated cosmologist, a class act and his podcast guests are leaders in their fields. More than just valid. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. Sean Carroll's Mindscape - Wondery | Premium Podcasts It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. 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. And he said, "Yes, sure." We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" I wrote a big review article about it. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. I just want to say. People had learned things, but it was very slow. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. 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. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. 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. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Really, really great guy. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. I had the best thesis committee ever. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. Maybe that's not fair. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. I became much less successful so far in actually publishing in that area, but I hope -- until the pandemic hit, I was hopeful my Santa Fe connection would help with that. I've got work and it's going well. Measure all the matter in the universe. And we started talking, and it was great. You've been around the block a few times. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. So, I'm a big believer in the disciplines, but it would be at least fun to experiment with the idea of a university that just hired really good people. Very, very important. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. 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. Harvard is not the most bookish place in the world. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. It has not. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. Then why are you wasting my time? But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. No, not really. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. I do firmly believe that. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. Not especially, no. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. Six months is a very short period of time. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. And that got some attention also. No, not really. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. Ten of those men and no women were successful. Okay. What's so great about right now? Sean Carroll was denied tenure at University of Chicago, but he - Quora When I went to graduate school at Harvard, of course, it was graduate school, but I could tell that the undergraduate environment was entirely different. I think that the vast majority of benefit that students get from their university education is from interacting with other students. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. So, you're asking for specific biases, and I'm not very good at giving you them, but I'm a huge believer that they're out there, and we should all be trying our best to open our eyes to what they could be. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." It was over 50 students in the class at that time. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. I got books -- I liked reading. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. I think it's part of a continuum. They do not teach either. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. 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? November 16, 2022 9:15 am. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. . Like, crazily successful. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? January 2, 2023 11:30 am. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. David, my pleasure. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. I don't think they're trying to do bad things. Some even tried to show me the dark aspects of tenure, which to me sounded like a wealthy person's complaints about wealth. 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. You get dangerous. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. What mattered was learning the material. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. And I said, "Well, I thought about it." There were two that were especially good. Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. The system has benefited them. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. So, that's what he would do. Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. So, I said, well, how do you do that? Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. Sean Carroll (Author of The Big Picture) - Goodreads So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" 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 . As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. Then, there were books like Bob Wald's, or Steven Weinberg's, or Misner Thorne and Wheeler, the famous phonebook, which were these wonderful reference books, because there's so much in them. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. 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. The discussion with Stuart Bartlett was no exception. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. 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? So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. Online, I have my website, preposterousuniverse.com which collects my various writings and things like that, and I'm the host of a podcast called Mindscape where I talk to a bunch of people, physicists as well as other people. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. The four of us wrote a paper. Or, I could say, "Screw it." 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. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online. 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. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point.
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