why was sean carroll denied tenure

So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. 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. I haven't given it up yet. I pretend that they're separate. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. I love historicizing the term "cosmology," and when it became something that was respectable to study. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. What happened was between the beginning of my first postdoc and the end of my first postdoc, in cosmology, all the good theorists were working on the cosmic microwave background, and in particle physics, all the good theorists were working on dualities in one form or another, or string theory, or whatever. 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? So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. MIT was a weird place in various ways. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. If you take a calculus class, you learned all these techniques, like the product rule, and what to do with polynomials. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." Yeah, absolutely. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. I'm not discounting me. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. You should apply." They just don't care. Shared Services: Increased the dollars managed by more than 500% through a shared services program that capitalizes on both the cost . I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." We hit it off immediately. I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. 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, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. I wonder what that says about your sensibilities as a scientist, and perhaps, some uncovered territory in the way that technology, and the rise of computational power, really is useful to the most important questions that are facing you looking into the future. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. Absolutely. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. In fact, my wife Jennifer Ouellette, who is a science writer and culture writer for the website Ars Technica, she works from home, too. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. 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, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. 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. I think so, but I think it's even an exaggeration to say that Harvard or Stanford don't give people tenure, therefore it's not that bad. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. Who knows? Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. I remember -- who was I talking to? I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. 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. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. You don't understand how many difficulties -- how many systematic errors, statistical errors, all these observational selection biases. Who hasn't written one, really? Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. 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. We might have met at a cosmology conference. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. There's a few, but it's a small number. We bet a little bottle of port, because that's all we could afford as poor graduate students. I will not reveal who was invited and who was not invited, but you would be surprised at who was invited and who was not invited, to sort of write this proposal to the NSF for a physics frontier center. There's an equation you can point to. 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? He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? They decide to do physics for a living. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. When the book went away, I didn't have the license to do that anymore. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . Yeah, no, good. Be proud of it, rather than be sort of slightly embarrassed by it. Move on with it. There were a lot of required courses, and I had to take three semesters of philosophy, like it or not. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. This is what I do. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. On Carroll's view the universe begins to exist at the Big Bang only in the sense that a yardstick begins to exist at the first inch. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. No one does 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. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. I explained, and he said he had read this paper that he thought was interesting, by Richard Gott, on time machines, close time-like curves in gravity. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. They're rare. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. 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. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. . The world has changed a lot. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. So far so good. That's just not my thing. 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 biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. I think that the vast majority of benefit that students get from their university education is from interacting with other students. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. So, the late universe was clearly where they were invested. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. I love people who are just so passionate about their little specialty. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. 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. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. But this is a huge metaphysical assumption that underlies this debate and divides us. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. And I didn't. Where are the equations I can solve? 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, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. Cole. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. Not especially, no. 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. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. 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, the paper that I wrote is called The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes. Supervenience is this idea in philosophy that one level depends on another level in a certain way and supervenes on the lower level. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. So, that would happen. I'm not sure. So, Perlmutter, who was the leader of the other group, he and I had talked in very early days, because he was the coauthor with Bill Press on this review article. w of minus .9 or minus .8 means the density is slowly fading away. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. I know the field theory. Okay. If literally no one else cares about what you're doing, then you should rethink. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. Carroll has worked on a number of areas of theoretical cosmology, field theory and gravitation theory. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. You've been around the block a few times. That's a huge effect on people's lives. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. It gets you a job in a philosophy department. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? Both are okay in their different slots, depending on the needs of the institution at the time, but I think that a lot of times the committees choosing the people don't take this into consideration as much as they should. Like, several of them. It worked for them, and they like it. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. There's a lot of inertia. They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. Washington was just a delight. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. They come in different varieties. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. What was your thesis research on? And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. 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. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. You nerded out entirely. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. Then, of course, Brian and his team helped measure the value of omega by discovering the accelerating universe. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. There's nothing like, back fifteen years ago, we all knew we were going to discover the Higgs boson and gravitational ways. Again, I just worked with other postdocs. But I did learn something. "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 . Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics.

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