why was sean carroll denied tenure

Would I be interested in working on it with him? First, this conversation has been delightfully void of technology. Author admin Reading 4 min Views 5 Published by 2022. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." "What major research universities care about is research. And, you know, I could have written that paper myself. So, I'm really quite excited about this. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. We worked on it for a while, and we got stuck, and we needed to ask Alan for help. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. In some extent, it didn't. I like her a lot. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? But, you know, the contingencies of history. It's an honor. I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. Three, tell people about it. So, in that sense, technology just hasn't had a lot to say because we haven't been making a lot of discoveries, so we don't need to worry about that. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. Then, I'm happy to admit, if someone says, "Oh, you have to do a podcast interview," it's like, ah, I don't want to do this now. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. But within the physical sciences, there are gradations in terms of one's willingness to consider metaphysics as something that exists, that there are things about the universe that are not -- it's not a matter of them being not observable now because we lack the theories or the tools to observe them, but because they exist outside the bounds of science. Like, a collaboration that is out there in the open, and isn't trying to hide their results until they publish it, but anyone can chip in. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . And that's the only thing you do. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? You didn't ask a question, but yes, you are correct. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits . So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? Right. 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. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. I think it's gone by now. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." Now, there are a couple things to add to that. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. Given how productive you've been over the past ten months, when we look to the future, what are the things that are most important to you that you want to return to, in terms of normality? But maybe it's not, and I don't care. 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, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? 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. I wrote a big review article about it. No, not really. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. (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 . The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. This is what I do. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. 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. So, that's how I started working with Alan. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. His paths to tenure are: win Nobel, settle for 3rd rate state school, or go . Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. It is remarkable. It's the path to achieving tenure. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. I'll never be Joe Rogan or Marc Maron, or whatever. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. Not so they could do it. You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. Or, I could say, "Screw it." But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. MIT was a weird place in various ways. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. I think, to some extent, yes. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. So, I used it for my own purposes. 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. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. 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. Graduate school is a different thing. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." 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. I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? Sean Carroll on free will. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. There's a certain gravitational pull that different beliefs have that they fit together nicely. So, the technology is always there. I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. Those poor biologists had no chance that year. And he said, "Absolutely.