I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. Some people love it. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. I will get water while you're doing that. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. Like, crazily successful. Now, of course, he's a very famous guy. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. I taught them what an integral was, and what a derivative was. 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. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. Since I wrote Please give us a bit of background on your life and professional experience. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. But it needs to be mostly the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning. But I don't know what started it. I'm enough of a particle physicist. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. So, even though these were anticipated, they were also really good benchmarks, really good targets to shoot for. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. That's the job. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. So, becoming a string theorist was absolutely a live possibility in my mind. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. I remember, on the one hand, I did it and I sat down thinking it was really bad and I didn't do very well. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. I've got work and it's going well. Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. 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? Again, uniformly, I was horrible. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. Martin White. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. You're not going to get tenure. 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. This is what's known as the coincidence problem. So, I kind of talked with my friends. 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. There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. And I said, "But I did do that." Do you see this as all one big enterprise with different media, or are they essentially different activities with different goals in mind? Stephen Morrow is his name. Sean Carroll. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. I pretend that they're separate. I'll be back. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) What was your thesis research on? [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. What sparked that interest in you? We wrote a lot of papers together. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? 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. 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. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. It had been founded by Chandrasekhar, so there was some momentum there going. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. But I'm classified as a physicist. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? It's not what I want to do. 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 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. And gave him not a huge budget, but a few hundred thousand dollars a year. I don't know. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. Why did you do that?" 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 . All while I was in Santa Barbara. Since I've been ten years old, how about that? The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. 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. I think I did not really feel that, honestly. There's a bunch. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. 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. So, taste matters. Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" As long as I thought it was interesting, that counted for me. Something that very hard to get cosmologists even to care about, but the people who care about it are philosophers of physics, and people who do foundations of physics. Honestly, Caltech, despite being intellectually as good as Harvard or Princeton, if you get hired as an assistant professor, you almost certainly get tenure. Greg Anderson and I had written a paper. That's a tough thing to do. 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. 1.2 Quantum Gravity era began to exist. 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. A coalition of graduate students and scholars sent a letter to the university condemning the decision at the time. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . 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. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. What was your thought process along those lines? 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? It gets you a job in a philosophy department. 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. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. It would have been better for me. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. 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. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" . 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. I get that all the time. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? And then I could use that, and I did use it, quite profligately in all the other videos. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. Once you do that, people will knock on your door and say, "Please publish this as a textbook." So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. What was George Field's style like as a mentor? I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. I care a lot about the substance of the scientific ideas being accurately portrayed. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. For example, integrating gravity into the Standard Model. Like, where's the energy coming from? 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. Carroll is a vocal atheist who has debated with Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza and William Lane Craig. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. 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. 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. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. Everyone knew that was real. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. This is so exciting because you are one of the best interviewers out there, so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. Not especially, no. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. 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. So, that was one big thing. I was really surprised." You get one quarter off from teaching every year. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. What they meant was, like, what department, or what subfield, or whatever. And we started talking, and it was great. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. My mom got remarried, so I had a stepfather, but that didn't go very well, as it often doesn't, and then they got re-divorced, and so forth. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. Here is a sort of embarrassing but true story, which, I guess, this is the venue to tell these things in. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. So, they're not very helpful hints, but they're hints about something that is wrong with our fundamental way of thinking about things. We don't care what you do with it." And it was a . And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. 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. And you'd think that's a good thing, but it's really not on the physics job market. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. If this interview is important to you, you should consult earlier versions of the transcript or listen to the original tape. It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. I wrote a big review article about it. People still do it. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. 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. (The same years I was battling, several very capable people I had known in grad school at Berkeley were also denied tenure, possibly caught in the cutbacks at the time, possibly victims of a wave . We haven't talked about 30-meter telescopes. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. Wildly enthusiastic reception. 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? There were people who absolutely had thought about it. A stylistic clash, I imagine. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. 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. The idea of going out to dinner with a bunch of people after giving a talk is -- I'll do it because I have to do it, but it's not something I really look forward to. Don't have "a bad year.". So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. Certainly, no one academic in my family. So, an obvious question arises. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. Not a 100% expectation. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. I remember -- who was I talking to? I think there are plenty of physicists. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. 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. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. I do firmly believe that. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. Thank goodness. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. 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 can just do what I want. How did you develop your relationship with George Field? 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. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. 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 . Like, I did it. What I mean, of course, is the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity, what Frank Wilczek called the core theory. I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. So, we wrote a paper. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. 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. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. They discussed consciousness, the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics including moral realism. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. But in 2004, I had written that Arrow of Time paper, and that's what really was fascinating to me. 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. I think, like I said before, these are ideas that get put into your mind very gradually by many, many little things. I put an "s" on both of them. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. Melville, NY 11747 [17] He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the Department of Philosophy and The Department of Physics and Astronomy. The argument I make in the paper is if you are a physicalist, if you exclude by assumption the possibility of non-physical stuff -- that's a separate argument, but first let's be physicalists -- then, we know the laws of physics governing the stuff out of which we are made at the quantum field theory level. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? That one and a follow up to that. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. 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. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." The reason is -- I love Caltech. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). I had no interest. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? These are all very, very hard questions. 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.
Ww2 Aircraft Recognition Quiz, Wicklander Rationalization Examples, Articles W