why was sean carroll denied tenure

So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. I think, both, actually. : 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? And I said, "Yeah, sure." 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. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. I like her a lot. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. All of which is to say, once I got to Caltech, I did start working in broadening myself, but it was slow, and it wasn't my job. And he said, "Yes, sure." People had learned things, but it was very slow. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. If you found that there was a fundamental time directed-ness in nature, that the arrow of time was not emergent out of entropy increasing but was really part of the fundamental laws of physics. No sensible person doubted they would happen. 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. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. The rest of the field needs to care. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. But it's worked pretty well for me. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. There's no immediate technological, economic application to what we do. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. I'm just thrilled we were able to do this. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. Like, crazily successful. I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. So, that was true in high school. So, an obvious question arises. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. Tenure denial, seven years later. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. But he didn't know me in high school. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. Was the church part of your upbringing at all? But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. I had it. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. Let me ask you that question specifically on the topic of religion. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. It sounded very believable. So, that was with other graduate students. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. When I told Ed Guinan, my undergraduate advisor, that I had George Field as an advisor, he said, "Oh, you got lucky." But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. I think there are plenty of physicists. This is a weird list. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. Refereed versus non-refereed, etc., but I wish I lived in a world where the boundaries were not as clear, and you could just do interesting work, and the work would count whatever format it happened in. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. So, I do think that in a country of 300-and-some million people, there's clearly a million people who will go pretty far with you in hard intellectual stuff. That's right. Let's go back to the happier place of science. 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. And Bill was like, "No, it's his exam. There are evil people out there. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. I do firmly believe that. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. That's okay. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. It was a huge success. But do you see yourself as part of an intellectual tradition in terms of the kinds of things you've done, and the way that you've conveyed them to various audiences? They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. 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. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? You have the equation. Yeah, it absolutely is great. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". 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. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. It is incredibly draining for me to do it. You should not let w be less than minus one." Right. Would that be on that level? My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. 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. No one told me. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. 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? (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . Did you get any question like that? Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. So many ideas I want to get on paper. The original typescript is available. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. That doesn't work. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. 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. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. 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. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. But I loved it. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? So, that was a benefit. I was on the advanced track, and so forth. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. 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. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. 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. That's not data. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. Some of them also write books, but most of them focus on articles. 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? It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. Again, I was wrong over and over again. 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. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. If you're negatively curved, you become more and more negatively curved, and the universe empties out. We don't understand economics or politics. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. And it was a . But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. It's a junior faculty job. I wrote a big review article about it. I'm not someone who gains energy by interacting with other people. At Los Alamos, yes. No, quite the opposite. So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. So far so good. I'm close enough. Really, really great guy. Yeah, absolutely. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. Spread the word. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. Completely blindsided. Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time.

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