why was sean carroll denied tenure

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. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. We talked about discovering the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. 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. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. I was a little bit reluctant to do that, but it did definitely seem like the most promising way to go. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. They need it written within six months so it can be published before the discovery is announced. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. People still do it. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. And I said, "Yeah, sure." There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. Others, I've had students who just loved teaching. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. What can I write down? I'll just put them on the internet. 4. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. It's just like being a professor. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. "The University of Georgia has been . Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? It's a junior faculty job. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. 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. I will get water while you're doing that. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. So, that was with other graduate students. 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. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. . I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. So, a lot of the reasons why my path has been sort of zig-zaggy and back and forth is because -- I guess, the two reasons are: number one, I didn't have great sources of advice, and number two, I wasn't very good at taking the advice when I got it. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. It is remarkable. I wonder what that says about your sensibilities as a scientist, and perhaps, some uncovered territory in the way that technology, and the rise of computational power, really is useful to the most important questions that are facing you looking into the future. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. 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. Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. They seem unnatural to us. [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. That's a very hard question. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. So, it was really just a great place. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. We might have met at a cosmology conference. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. Washington was just a delight. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. I think people like me should have an easier time. Not so they could do it. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. Not especially, no. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. They're rare. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. Chicago is a little bit in between. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. 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. Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. I was ten years old. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. There's still fundamental questions. But I'm classified as a physicist. Whereas the accelerated universe was a surprise. You don't really need to do much for those. Like, crazily successful. 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. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. People know who you are. And now I know it. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. We used Wald, and it was tough. (The same years I was battling, several very capable people I had known in grad school at Berkeley were also denied tenure, possibly caught in the cutbacks at the time, possibly victims of a wave . It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. I did everything right. There's this huge gap in between what we give the popular press, where I have to fight for three equations in my book, and a textbook, which is three equations every paragraph. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. Move on with it. 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. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. That's just the system. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. Sean, I wonder, maybe it's more of a generational question, but because so many cosmologists enter the field via particle physics, I wonder if you saw any advantages of coming in it through astronomy. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. 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 do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. 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? [54] In this public dialogue, they discussed the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. It sounded very believable. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. 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. So, we made a bet. 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.". Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. 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. I lucked into it, once again. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. 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. People had learned things, but it was very slow. ", "Is God a good theory? So, the technology is always there. So, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. No one told me. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. 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. So, we talked about different possibilities. MIT was a weird place in various ways. It was over 50 students in the class at that time. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. It's a necessary thing but the current state of theoretical physicists is guessing. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. I don't want to say anything against them. I would say that implicitly technology has been in the background. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. But you were. My mom was tickled. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. We wrote a lot of papers together. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. Okay. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate.

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