Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. I said, well, what about R plus one over R? Young people. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi, Bill Press and George Field at Harvard, and also other students at Harvard, rather than just picking one respectable physicist advisor and sticking with him. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". I love that, and they love my paper. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. Some Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. And he's like, "Sure." He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. I'm not making this up. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True I wrote a couple papers with Marc Kamionkowski and Adrienne Erickcek, who was a student, on a similar sounding problem: what if inflation happened faster in one side of the sky than on the other side of the sky? So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. But most of us didn't think it was real. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . No, no. At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. Tenure denial, seven years later. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. [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. Tell us a bit about your new book . Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. That's a huge effect on people's lives. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. So, string theory was definitely an option, and I could easily have done it if circumstances had been different, but I never really regretted not doing it. This could be great. You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. There was no internet back then. Go longer. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. I think there are plenty of physicists. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. So, we were just learning a whole bunch of things and sort of fishing around. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." Oh, kinds of physics. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. Sean Carroll's Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. If they don't pan out, they just won't give him tenure." I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. So, I honestly just can't tell you what the spark was. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. He offered 13 pieces of . So, I was behind already. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. No, not really. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. 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. It's good to talk about physics, so I'll talk about physics a little bit. Really, really great guy. Sean Carroll (Author of The Big Picture) - Goodreads Cornel West Says Harvard Denied Him Tenure Consideration - HuffPost There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. Now, the academic titles. What Is a Tenured Employee? Benefits of Earning This Status They're a little bit less intimidated. In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? Was this your first time collaborating with Michael Turner? 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? Yes. We should move into that era." It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. Sean, let's take it all the way back to the beginning. These are all very, very hard questions. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. Oh, yeah, entirely. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? Everyone knows about that. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. And he said, "Yes, sure." I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. And part of it was because no one told me. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. The one way you could imagine doing it, before the microwave background came along, was you could measure the amount by which the expansion of the universe changes over time. That leads to what's called the Big Rip. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. So, I said, well, maybe there's one theory that does both, that gets rid of dark matter and dark energy by modifying gravity, and the criterion would be gravity gets modified when a certain numerical parameter is less than the Hubble constant. There's an equation you can point to. / Miscellany. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. Not necessarily because they were all bookish. This is real physics. 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? 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. So, I want to do something else. You have enough room to get it right. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. 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, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. No, not really. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. I chose wrongly again. 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. 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. But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. Physics does give you that. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. I don't agree with what they do. It sounded very believable. I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. Fred Adams, Katie Freese, Larry Widrow, Terry Walker, a bunch of people who were really very helpful to me in learning things. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? We'll have to see. There's good physics reasons. So, now that I have a podcast, I get to talk to more cool, very broad people than I ever did before. I remember -- who was I talking to? Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Thank you for inviting me on. [8], Carroll's speeches on the philosophy of religion also generate interest as his speeches are often responded to and talked about by philosophers and apologists. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. Carroll, as an atheist, is publicly asserting that the creation of infinite numbers of new universes every moment by every particle in our universe is more plausible than the existence of God. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. 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. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit I've done it. That's just the system. 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. So, Shadi Bartsch, who is a classics professor at Chicago, she and I proposed to teach a course on the history of atheism. What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora November 16, 2022 9:15 am. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. That's what I am. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. Netta Engelhardt and I did a podcast on black hole information, and in the first half, I think we were very accessible, and then we just let our hair down in the second half. To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. 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? So, taste matters. It was July 4th. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. 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. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. Sean Carroll on Consciousness, Physicalism, and the History of 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. So, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. But I didn't get in -- well, I got in some places but not others. That's one of the things you have to learn slowly as an advisor, is that there's no recipe for being a successful graduate student. More than just valid. I got books -- I liked reading. And you know, Twitter and social media and podcasts are somewhere in between that. One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Also, they were all really busy and tired. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. You get different answers from different people. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. So, that was a benefit. That's what supervenience means. 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. Playing the game, writing the papers that got highly cited, being in the mainstream, and doing things that everyone agreed were interesting, which I did to a certain extent but not all the way when I was in Chicago. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. I had an astronomy degree, and I'd hung out with cosmologists, so I knew the buzzwords and everything, but I hadn't read the latest papers. It's a junior faculty job. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. George didn't know the stuff. My response to him was, "No thanks." That's a very hard question. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" Were you on the job market at this point, or you knew you wanted to pursue a second postdoc? And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. I think it's gone by now. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. 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? Like, crazily successful. 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. Well, how would you know? We've already established that. So, two things. Not any ambition to be comprehensive, or a resource for researchers, or anything like that, for people who wanted to learn it. 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. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. 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. Let's put it that way. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. And at least a year passed. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. Why do people get denied tenure? But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. 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. If I could get a million people buy my books, I'd be a really best-selling author. I don't know how public knowledge this is. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. Now, the high impact research papers that you knew you had written, but unfortunately, your senior colleagues did not, at the University of Chicago, what were you working on at this point? The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. On the point of not having quantum field theory as an undergraduate, I wonder, among your cohort, if you felt that you stuck out, like a more working class kid who went to Villanova, and that was very much not the profile of your fellow 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. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. Carroll, S.B. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. There's a few, but it's a small number. 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. 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. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. 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. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. If tenure is not granted, the professor's employment at the university is terminated and he/she must look for work elsewhere regardless of the status of classes, grants, projects, or other work in progress. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. So, that's how I started working with Alan. It was a tough decision, but I made it. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." Again, in my philosophy of pluralism, there should be both kinds. So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. 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. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. What sparked that interest in you? Measure all the matter in the universe. I'm in favor of being connected to the data. 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. 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. They're across the street, so that seems infinitely far away. I'm very happy with that. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. 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. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that.
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