why was sean carroll denied tenurehow did bryan cranston lose his fingers
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. 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. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. I love that, and they love my paper. So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want . That's absolutely true. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? 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. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. It's a messy thing. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? [54] In this public dialogue, they discussed the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. Melville, NY 11747 And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. We'll measure it." My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. 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. And it's not just me. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. 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. He invited a few of us. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. And guess what? You get different answers from different people. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. What were the most interesting topics at that time? So, maybe conditions down the line will force us into some terrible situation, but I would be very, very sad if that were the case. 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. Onondaga County. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? It's a research institute in Santa Fe that is devoted to the study of complexity in all its forms. . And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." It has not. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. So, my thought process was, both dark matter and dark energy are things we haven't touched. Powerful people from all over the place go there. 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. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. 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. 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. Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. 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. Get on with your life. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. 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. There are so many people at Chicago. He's the best graduate student I've ever had. 4. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. So, if you can do it, it is a great thing. No, you're completely correct. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. We'll figure it out. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? Also, they were all really busy and tired. 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. This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. I wrote a blog post that has become somewhat infamous, called How to Get Tenure at a Major Research University. I was surprised when people, years later, told me everyone reads that, because the attitude that I took in that blog post was -- and it reflects things I tell my students -- I was intentionally harsh on the process of getting tenure. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. Not especially, no. In many ways, it was a great book. So, we wrote a paper. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. The four of us wrote a paper. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. I wonder, for you, that you might not have had that scholarly baggage, if it was easier for you to just sort of jump right in, and say Zoom is the way to do it. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. His most-cited work, "Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due To New Gravitational Physics?" The second book, the Higgs boson book, I didn't even want to write. Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. Well, Harvard -- the astronomy department, which was part and parcel of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- so, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory joined together in the 1970s to form this big institution, which I still think might be the largest collection of astronomy PhDs, in the United States, anyway. He is not at all ashamed to tell you that and explains things sometimes in his talks about cosmology by reference to his idea about God's existence. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. A derivative is the slope of something. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. 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, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." I said, "Well, yeah, I did. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. Maybe it was that there was some mixture of hot dark matter and cold dark matter, or maybe it was that there was a cosmological constant. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. 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? That was my first choice. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. People had mentioned the accelerating universe in popular books before, but I honestly didn't think they'd done a great job. No, no. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. Sean Carroll. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. It's all worth it in the end. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . No one cares what you think about the existence of God. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? But there were postdocs. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. I had never heard of him before. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. More than just valid. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. It worked for them, and they like it. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. I really do think that in some sense, the amount that a human being is formed and shaped, as a human being, not as a scientist, is greater when they're an undergraduate than when they're a graduate. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. 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. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. And he said, "Yes, sure." Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. It doesn't always work. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. It was not a very strict Catholic school. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. You nerded out entirely. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. 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. Now, look, if I'm being objective, maybe this dramatically decreases my chances of having a paper that makes a big impact, because I'm not writing papers that other people are already focused on. Did you get any question like that? There's still fundamental questions. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. Reply Insider . Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? 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. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? 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. I have a lot of graduate students. Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. ", "Is God a good theory? We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. Everyone knows about that. And now I know it. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. I will confess the error of my ways. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. Since I wrote That's just not my thing. It's difficult, yes. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. And the answer is, to most people, there is. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. One, drive research forward. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). 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. Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. In retrospect, there's two big things. So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? Do you want to put them all in the same basket? Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. That's fine. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. From the outside looking in, you're on record saying that your natural environment for working in theoretical physics is a pen and a pad, and your career as a podcaster, your comfort zone in the digital medium, from the outside looking in, I've been thinking, is there somebody who was better positioned than you to weather the past ten months of social distancing, right? 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. The reason is -- I love Caltech. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things.
why was sean carroll denied tenure