Those poor biologists had no chance that year. It doesn't lead to new technology. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? 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. Sean Carroll Family. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. Now, I did, when the quarantine-pandemic lockdown started, I did think to myself that there are a bunch of people trying to be good citizens, thinking to themselves, what can I do for the world to make it a better place? I just think they're wrong. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. Sidney Coleman, in the physics department, and done a lot of interesting work on topology and gauge theories. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. They have a certain way of doing things. Is it the perfect situation? There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. This is the advice I tell my students. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. There's an equation you can point to. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. 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. So, even though the specialists should always be the majority, we non-specialists need to make an effort to push back to be included more than we are. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. Carroll was dishonest on two important points. Did you do that self-consciously? The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. Let's go back to the happier place of science. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. The system has benefited them. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. Part of that was a shift of the center of gravity from Europe to America. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. 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. 1 Physics Ellipse I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. I was less good of a fit there. . So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. So, George was randomly assigned to me. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. We don't understand economics or politics. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. 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. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. I'll be back. I lucked into it, once again. But maybe it could. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. Carroll's initial post-Jets act -- replacing Bill Parcells in New England -- was moderately successful (two playoff berths in three years). But they're really doing things that are physics. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. 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. We don't care what you do with it." There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. And that got some attention also. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. They were all graduate students at the time. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. You know, I'm still a little new at being a podcaster. Let's just take the risk, and if they don't work out they won't get tenure." The tenure decision is very different than the hiring decision. Carroll, S.B. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. @seanmcarroll . You're looking under the lamppost. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. Carroll has a B.S. They had no idea that I was doing that, but they knew --. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? I do this over and over again. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. So, like I said, we were for a long time in observational astronomy trying to understand how much stuff there is in the universe, how much matter there is. 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. Not just because I didn't, but because I think the people you get advice from are the ones who got tenure. So, that would happen. So, they looked at me with new respect, then, because I had some insider knowledge because of that. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. It's a junior faculty job. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? I just don't want to do that anymore. Learn new things about the world. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. We encourage researchers to utilize the full-text search onthis pageto navigate our oral histories or to useour catalogto locate oral history interviews by keyword. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! What can I write down? So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. That was always true. Here is my thought process. 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? For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. I had some great teachers along the way, but I wouldn't say I was inspired to do science, or anything like that, by my teachers. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. 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. I've gotten good at it. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. What are the Different Reasons for Being Denied Tenure? Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. In fact, on the flip side of that, the biggest motivation I had for starting my podcast was when I wrote a previous book called The Big Picture, which was also quite interdisciplinary, and I had to talk to philosophers, neuroscientists, origin of life researchers, computer scientists, people like that, I had a license to do that. 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. It came as a complete surprise, I hadn't anticipated any problems at all. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. I got the Packard Fellowship. 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. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. 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. This is an example of it. It's not just trendiness. Is there something wrong about it?" These are all very, very hard questions. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. And I didn't. In many ways, it was a great book. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. There are numerical variables and character variables. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. So, it's not a disproof of that point of view, but it's an illustration of exactly how hard it is, what an incredible burden it is. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. Absolutely. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. It's also self-serving for me to say that, yes. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online. A derivative is the slope of something. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. They chew you up and spit you out. Bob Geroch was there also, but he wasn't very active in research at the time. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. Sean Carroll's Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014