why was sean carroll denied tenure

And it's not just me. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? Not especially, no. I had no interest. It was like, if it's Tuesday, this must be Descartes, kind of thing. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. So, taste matters. Then you've come to the right place. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" You've got to find the intersection. 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. I like teaching a lot. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. We might have met at a cosmology conference. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. 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. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. The reason is -- I love Caltech. You know, I'm not sure I ever doubted it. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. [32][33][34] Some of his work has been on violations of fundamental symmetries, the physics of dark energy, modifications of general relativity and the arrow of time. It was hard to figure out what the options were. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. So, that's what he would do. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. 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. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? I pretend that they're separate. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? They're like, what is a theory? I wrote a paper with Lottie Ackerman and Mark Wise on anisotropies. That's why I said, "To first approximation." I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. 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? But it doesn't hurt. This is probably 2000. 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.". The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. Well, or I just didn't care. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. Reply Insider . No one told me. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. And I didn't. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. You really have to make a case. 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. Since I wrote But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. That would be great. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. They're rare. You can't get a non-tenured job. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. Okay. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. There were two that were especially good. He had to learn it. 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. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. This is so exciting because you are one of the best interviewers out there, so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. 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. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. Go longer. So, that's how I started working with Alan. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. Everyone knew that was real. 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?" 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. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. 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? And it's owing to your sense of adventure that that's probably part of the exhilaration of this, not having a set plan and being open to possibilities. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. I was really surprised." It's difficult, yes. I'll be back. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." 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. 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. I like her a lot. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? 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. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. 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. Six months is a very short period of time. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. 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?" He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. Young people. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. There's a bunch. But maybe it's not, and I don't care. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. 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 said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. We don't care what you do with it." I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. Absolutely. He explains the factors that led to his undergraduate education at Villanova, and his graduate work at Harvard, where he specialized in astronomy under the direction of George Field. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. So, it didn't appear overwhelming, and it was a huge success. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? But I don't remember what it was. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. But, you know, my standard is what is it that excites me at the moment? But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. 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. It was very small. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. I was still thought to be a desirable property. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. At Harvard, it's the opposite. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. 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? 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. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. No, not really. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. But then, the thing is, I did. Carroll, S.B. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . Again, in my philosophy of pluralism, there should be both kinds. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? Not one of the ones that got highly cited. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. I love it. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. It's just like being a professor. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. Tenure denial, seven years later. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. Also, assistant professor, right? We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. "The University of Georgia has been . You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. And he's like, "Sure." Again, I was wrong over and over again. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. Yeah, I think that's right. I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? So, I kind of talked with my friends. 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. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. 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. Oh, yeah, entirely. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. More than one. That was always temporary. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . Cole. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. My mom was tickled. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. Another bad planning on my part. The four of us wrote a paper. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that.

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