As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. Video of Sean Carroll's panel discussion, "Quantum to Cosmos", answering the biggest questions in physics today, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. So, thank you so much. In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? So, the technology is always there. So, I said, well, how do you do that? I'm not making this up. There's always exceptions to that. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. My thesis defense talk was two transparencies. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. but academe is treacherous. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. If I could get a million people buy my books, I'd be a really best-selling author. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. Having said that, they're still really annoying. One, drive research forward. An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. 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. You're old. 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. So, that was a benefit. The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. As long as I was at Chicago, I was the group leader of the theory group in the cosmological physics center. He knew all the molecular physics, and things like that, that I would never know. Various people on the faculty came to me after I was rejected, and tried to explain to me why, and they all gave me different stories. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. Being on the debate team, trying to work through different attitudes, back and forth. There are evil people out there. But there definitely has been a shift. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. 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. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. So, and it's good to be positive about the great things about science and academia and so forth, but then you can be blindsided. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. So, the salon as an enlightenment ideal is very much relevant to you. My response to him was, "No thanks." We knew he's going pass." So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. Learn new things about the world. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. Of all the things that you were working on, what topic did you settle on? And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. 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.". Go longer. It was true that as you looked at larger and larger scales in the universe, you saw more and more matter, not just on an absolute scale, but also relative to what you needed to see. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. Is this where you want to be long-term, or is it possible that an entirely new opportunity could come along that could compel you that maybe this is what you should pursue next? That's the case I tried to make. All of the ability I have to give talks, and anything like that, has come from working at it. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. Not to give away the spoiler alert, but I eventually got denied tenure at Chicago, and I think that played a lot into the decision. But they often ask me to join their grant proposal to Templeton, or whatever, and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. "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 . I was ten years old. Yeah, it absolutely is great. That's what really makes me feel successful. You know when someone wants to ask a question. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. In fact, you basically lose money, because you have to go visit Santa Fe occasionally. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. I've never cared. Certainly, I would have loved to go to Harvard, but I didn't even apply. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. But I wanted to come back to the question of class -- working class, middle class. We will literally not discover, no matter how much more science we do, new particles in fields that are relevant to the physics underlying what's going on in your body, or this computer, or anything else. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. There are numerical variables and character variables. 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. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. 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? They are clearly different in some sense. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. I think that the secret to teaching general relativity to undergraduates is it's not that much different from teaching it to graduate students, except there are no graduate students in the audience. Very, very important. And my response to them is what we do, those of us who are interested in the deepest questions about the nature of reality, whether they're physicists, or philosophers, or whoever, like I said before, we're not going to cure cancer. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. There's a famous Levittown in Long Island, but there are other Levittowns, including one outside Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sean M. Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and founder of preposterousuniverse.com and the Mindscape podcast. [14] He has also published a YouTube video series entitled "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" which provides physics instruction at a popular-science level but with equations and a mathematical basis, rather than mere analogy. I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." I'll never be Joe Rogan or Marc Maron, or whatever. This is easily the most important, most surprising empirical discovery in fundamental physics in -- I want to say in my lifetime, but certainly since I've been doing science. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. This is December 1997. But it doesn't hurt. We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. You've been around the block a few times. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. So, Wati Taylor, who's now an MIT professor, Miguel Ortiz, Mark Trodden. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). Where was string theory, and how much was it on your radar when you were thinking about graduate school and the kinds of things you might pursue for thesis research? So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. We don't know the theory of everything. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. What the world really needs is a book that says God does not exist. And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? 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. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. That was not on my radar. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. It was very long. 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. Everything is going great. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. It's not what I want to do. 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. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. The biggest one was actually -- people worry that I was blogging, and things like that. 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. [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. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. What are the odds? It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. Yes. I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. So, my other graduate school colleagues, Brian had gone to the University of Arizona, Ian Dell'Antonio, who was another friend of mine, went to, I think, Haverford. What about minus 1.1? As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. 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. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. 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. And they said, "Sure!" I think all three of those things are valid and important. You know, high risk, high gain kinds of things that are looking for these kinds of things. These were all live possibilities. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. Social media, Instagram. So, literally, Brian's group named themselves the High Redshift Supernova Project: Measuring the Deceleration of the Universe. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. In a sense, I hope not. I FOUGHT THE LAW: After the faculty at the Chicago-Kent College of Law voted 22 to 1 in favor of granting Molly Lien tenure in March, Ms. Lien gave herself (and her husband) a trip to Florence. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Knowing what I know now, I would have thought about philosophy, or even theoretical computer science or something like that, but at the time, law seemed like this wonderful combination of logic and human interest, which I thought was fascinating. We had problem sets that we graded. It moved away. So, let's get off the tenure thing. 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. They just don't care. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. We'll see what comes next for you, and of course, we'll see what comes next in theoretical physics. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. Now, the academic titles. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? In some extent, it didn't. I don't think it has anything to do with what's more important, or fundamental, or exciting, or better science, but there is a certain kind of discipline that you learn in learning physics, and a certain bag of tricks and intellectual guiding stars that you pick up that are very, very helpful. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. Ten of those men and no women were successful. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. So, we talked about different possibilities. Let's go back to the happier place of science. It was just -- could that explain away both the dark matter and the dark energy, by changing gravity when space time was approximately flat? So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. You should not let w be less than minus one." 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. It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. That's not what I do for a living. 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. The unhappy result of preferring less candor is the loss we all feel now.". Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. Likewise, the galaxies in the universe are expanding away from each other, but they should be, if matter is the dominant form of energy in the universe, slowing down, because they're all pulling on each other through the mutual gravitational force. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. But they're really doing things that are physics. So, it was to my benefit that I didn't know, really, what the state of the art was. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. Having said that, the slight footnote is you open yourself up, if you are a physicist who talks about other things, to people saying, "Stick to physics." So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity develops the claim that science no longer needs to posit a divine being to explain the existence of the universe. You get different answers from different people. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. Again, I was wrong. Well, by that point, I was much more self-conscious of what my choices meant. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. 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. What mattered was learning the material. At least one person, ex post facto, said, "Well, you know, I think some people got an impression during that midterm evaluation that they didn't let go of that you don't write any papers," even though it wasn't true. So, I took it upon myself to do this YouTube series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. 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. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. It was funny, because now I have given a lot of talks in my life. So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. Did you get any question like that?