why was sean carroll denied tenure

The production quality was very bad, and the green screen didn't work very well. 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 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. I can just do what I want. Did you connect with your father later in life? Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. 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. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. 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. Young people. I also started a new course, general relativity for undergraduates, which had not been taught before, and they loved it. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits . I don't agree with what they do. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." When I went to MIT, it was even worse. You can challenge them if that seems right. In other words, let's say you went to law school, and you would now have a podcast in an alternate [universe] or a multiverse, on innovation, or something like that. Someone like me, for example, who is very much a physicist, but also is interested in philosophy, and I would like to be more active even than I am at philosophy at the official level, writing papers and things like that. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. 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. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. I have no problems with that. We have dark energy, it's pushing the universe apart, it's surprising. What sparked that interest in you? As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. This could be great. Just get to know people. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. Not a 100% expectation. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. But when you go to graduate school, you don't need money in physics and astronomy. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. And I said, "Yeah, sure." Intellectual cultures, after all, are just as capable of errors associated with moral and political inertia as administrative cultures are. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. So, I made the point that he should judge me not on my absolute amount of knowledge, but by how far I had come since the days he taught me quantum field theory. That's one of the things that I wanted to do. I think it's more that people don't care. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. I'm trying to finish a paper right now. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. 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. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. You tell me, you get a hundred thousand words to explain things correctly, I'm never happier than that. It's not just trendiness. Go longer. In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. 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. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. That's absolutely true. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. Do you have any good plans for a book?" I didn't really want to live there. 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, 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. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. I think it's gone by now. I did always have an interest in -- I don't want to use the word outreach because that sort of has formal connotations, but in reaching out. So, late 1997, Phil Lubin, who was an astronomy professor at Santa Barbara, organized a workshop at KITP on measuring cosmological parameters with the cosmic microwave background. 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. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. 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. What should we do? Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. 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? When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. I think, to some extent, yes. 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. So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. What were the most interesting topics at that time? I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. There's no other input that you have. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. But then, the thing is, I did. When it came time to choose postdocs, when I was a grad student, because, like I said, both particle physics and cosmology were in sort of fallowed times; there were no hot topics that you had to be an expert in to get a postdoc. I think people like me should have an easier time. 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." What is it that you are really passionate about right now?" By the way, I could tell you stories at Caltech how we didn't do that, and how it went disastrously wrong. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? Sean Carroll. I started a new seminar series that brought people together in different ways. You really, really need scientists or scholars who care enough about academia to help organize it, and help it work, and start centers and institutes, and blaze new trails for departments. We'll measure it." So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? 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. "The University of Georgia has been . Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. Sean Carroll. There's a quote that is supposed to be by Niels Bohr, "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." Not to mention, socialization. I'm an atheist. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. So, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. So, that's physics, but also biology, economics, society, computers, complex systems appear all over the place. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. 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. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. It's a necessary thing but the current state of theoretical physicists is guessing. And I could double down on that, and just do whatever research I wanted to do, and I could put even more effort into writing books and things like that. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. As a public intellectual who has discussed, I mean, really, it's a library worth of things that you've talked about and [who you have] talked with, is your sense first that physics being the foundational science is the most appropriate place as an intellectual launching pad to talk about these broader topics? So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. You're not going to get tenure. 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? Martin White. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. So, that's one important implication. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. . Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. 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. You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. I do a lot of outreach, but if you look closely at what I do, it's all trying to generate new ideas and make arguments. I'm just thrilled we were able to do this. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. It's a messy thing. [5][6][7][8] He is considered a prolific public speaker and science populariser. I think that's the right way to put it. I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. What's interesting is something which is in complete violation of your expectation from everything you know about field theory, that in both the case of dark matter and dark energy, if you want to get rid of them in modified gravity, you're modifying them when the curvature of space time becomes small rather than when it becomes large. Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way.

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