why was sean carroll denied tenure why was sean carroll denied tenure

That's not all of it. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. Sean, for my last question, looking forward, I want to reflect on your educational trajectory, and the very uncertain path from graduate school to postdoc, to postdoc to the University of Chicago. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. And I've guessed. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. Honestly, I only got that because Jim Hartle was temporarily the director. It's a messy thing. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. 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? Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Or, I could say, "Screw it." I think I did not really feel that, honestly. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. That just didn't happen. How do we square the circle with the fact that you were so amazingly positioned with the accelerating universe a very short while ago? So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. But I think, as difficult as it is, it's an easier problem than adding new stuff that pushes around electors and protons and neutrons in some mysterious way. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. You don't really need to do much for those. I said, "Well, yeah, I did. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. Huge excitement because of this paper. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. Who did you work with? In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. That's right. 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. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. They decide to do physics for a living. Physicists knew, given the schedule of the Large Hadron Collider, and so forth, that it would probably be another year before they raised the significance to that to really declare a discovery. That's it. 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. 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. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. So, they knew everything that I had done. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. Fast forward to 2011. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." It had gotten a little stuck. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. The system has benefited them. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." Good. One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. I could have tried to work with someone in the physics department like Cumrun, or Sidney Coleman would have been the two obvious choices. 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. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. "One of the advantages of the blog is that I knew that a lot of people in my field read it and this was the best way to advertise that I'm on the market." Read more by . He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. 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. 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?" And you mean not just in physics. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. This is real physics. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. 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. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. At Los Alamos, yes. 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 have enormous respect for the people who do that. We certainly never worked together. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. I'll be back. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. We're not developing a better smart phone. But you were. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. You have the equation. We could discover gravitational waves in the microwave background that might be traced back to inflation. People still do it. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. And I knew that. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. I took courses with Raoul Bott at Harvard, who was one of the world's great topologists. 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. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. 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. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. 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. So, taste matters. 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.". There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. It's the path to achieving tenure. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. It's just like being a professor. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. [54] In this public dialogue, they discussed the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. No one expects that small curvatures of space time, anything interesting should happen at all. It was a little bit of whiplash, because as a young postdoc, one of the things you're supposed to do is bring in seminar speakers. Sean, as a public intellectual with your primary identity being a scientist but with tremendous facility in the humanities and philosophy and thinking about politics, in the humanities -- there's a lot of understanding of schools of thought, of intellectual tradition, that is not nearly as prominent as it is in the sciences. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. We might have met at a cosmology conference. They basically admitted that. 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? So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. The dynamo, the Biermann battery, the inverse cascade, magnetic helicity, plasma effects, all of these things that are kind of hard for my purely theoretical physicist heart to really wrap my mind around. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. Even the teachers at my high school, who were great in many ways, couldn't really help me with that. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. No, I cannot in good conscience do that. Maybe that's not fair. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. Since I wrote There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. 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? Did you get any question like that? Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. 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. 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. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. You can't get a non-tenured job. What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" That's my question. Did you connect with your father later in life? 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.