I'm very, very close to phoning up my publisher and saying, "Can we delay it?" But still, way under theorized, really, for the whole operation, if you consider it. So, we wrote a paper. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. Like, several of them. There's no delay on the line. This is a non-tenured position. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? I think that's a true argument, and I think I can make that argument. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. I think people like me should have an easier time. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. Carroll has a B.S. I love writing books so much. And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. So, the undergraduates are just much more comfortable learning it. Oh, kinds of physics. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. People are listening with headphones for an hour at a time, right? Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. That's why I said, "To first approximation." We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. I'm enough of a particle physicist. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. Sean Carroll: I'm not in a super firm position, cause I don't have tenure at Caltech, so, but I don't care either. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. I can't get a story out in a week, or whatever. That's why I joined the debate and speech team.
After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she So, this is again a theme that goes back and forth all the time in my career, which is that there's something I like, but something else completely unrelated was actually more stimulating and formative at the time. We're kind of out of that. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. Let every student carve out a path of study. That's a recognized thing that's going on. Not to mention, socialization. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. You can't get a non-tenured job. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. You can do a bit of dimensional analysis and multiply by the speed of light, or whatever, and you notice that that acceleration scale you need to explain the dark matter in Milgrom's theory is the same as the Hubble constant. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. That was not on my radar. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. 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. The Hubble constant is famously related to the dark energy, because it's the current value of the Hubble constant where dark energy is just taking over. So, every person who came, [every] graduate student, was assigned an advisor, a faculty member, to just sort of guide them through their early years. 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. He was a very senior guy. 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. No, not really. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. Yeah, I think that's right.
Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it I want it to be okay to talk about these things amongst themselves when they're not professional physicists. Not only do we have a theory that fits all the data, but we also dont even have a prediction for that theory that we haven't tested yet. We'll figure it out. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. There's an equation you can point to. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. Who knows? They chew you up and spit you out. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. Thank you for inviting me on. And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. Here is my thought process.
Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth I mentioned very briefly that I collaborated on a paper with the high redshift supernova team. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. He was a blessing, helping me out.
Nikole Hannah-Jones Denied Tenure at University of North Carolina I think, to some extent, yes. 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. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. Bob Kirshner and his supernova studies were also a big deal. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. 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. We both took general relativity at MIT from Nick Warner. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. I did various things. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. So, they keep things at a certain level. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? Terry Walker was one of them, who's now a professor at Ohio State. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. There's good physics reasons. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. 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. We just knew we couldn't afford it. I'm curious, is there a straight line between being a ten year old and making a beeline to the physics and astronomy department? Hopefully it'll work out. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. Oh, yeah, absolutely. He is known for atheism, critique of theism and defense of naturalism. This happens quite often. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. The COBE satellite that was launched on a pretty shoestring budget at the time, and eventually found the CMB anisotropies, that was the second most complicated thing NASA had ever put in orbit after the Hubble space telescope. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. 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, it was a very -- it was a big book. That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. So, I said, well, how do you do that? But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. Well, how would you know? 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. Graduate school is a different thing. No, not really. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. This is a weird list. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. I heard my friends at other institutions talk about their tenure file, getting all of these documents together in a proposal for what they're going to do. So, that was true in high school. Huge excitement because of this paper. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? Get on with your life. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. So, by 1992 or 1993, it's been like, alright, what have you done for me lately? 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. And things are much worse now, by the way, so enormously, again, I can't complain compared to what things are like now. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? In physics, it doesn't matter, it's just alphabetical. More importantly, the chances that that model correctly represents the real world are very small. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. Because they pay for your tuition. 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. Tenure denial, seven years later. I chose wrongly again. But I'm unconstrained by caring about whether they're hot topics. 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. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. I do firmly believe that. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. My mom was tickled. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. What's interesting -- you're finally getting the punchline of this long story. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? That was always temporary. Wildly enthusiastic reception. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? 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. They go every five years, and I'm not going try to renew my contract. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. Let's face it, quantum mechanics, gravitation, cosmology, these are fields that need a lot of help. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. I think I did not really feel that, honestly. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. You can explain the acceleration of the universe, but you can't explain the dark matter in such a theory. He says that if you have a galaxy, roughly speaking, there's a radius inside of which you don't need dark matter to explain the dynamics of the galaxy, but outside of that radius, you do. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. But I don't remember what it was. 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. 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. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. There's always some institutional resistance. You know, students are very different. Benefits of tenure. There was no internet back then. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. 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. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . But it was kind of overwhelming.
I have a short attention span. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. And I've guessed. Now, you might ask, who cares? That's right. It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. More than one. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. 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.
Stephen Knight on Sean Carroll, Colin Wright, and the binary of sex 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. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. The tuition was right.
Sean Carroll - Chief Procurement Officer - NYS Office of General They didn't know. A stylistic clash, I imagine.
Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. So, a lot of the reasons why my path has been sort of zig-zaggy and back and forth is because -- I guess, the two reasons are: number one, I didn't have great sources of advice, and number two, I wasn't very good at taking the advice when I got it. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. 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. 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. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . But other people have various ways of getting to the . I enjoy in the moment, and then I've got to go to sleep afterwards, or at least be left alone. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. And he said, "Yes, sure." It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. 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. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. You have enough room to get it right. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. 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. 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. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. Yeah, but you know, I need to sort of emphasize the most important thing, and then my little twist on it. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. So, there was the physics department, and the astronomy department, and there was also what's called the Enrico Fermi Institute, which was a research institute, but it was like half of the physics department and half of the astronomy department was in it. And we started talking, and it was great. The whole thing was all stapled together, and that was my thesis. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience.
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