But the astronomers went out and measured the matter density of the universe, and they always found it was about .25 or .3 of what you needed. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. So, they said, "Here's what we'll do. Did you do that self-consciously? Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. [55], In 2018, Carroll and Roger Penrose held a symposium on the subject of The Big Bang and Creation Myths. They saw the writing on the wall. Everything is going great. Very, very important. Get on with your life. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. Huge excitement because of this paper. I don't want that left out of the historical record. It's not good time management, but we did it and we enjoyed it. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. Part of it was the Manhattan Project and being caught up in technological development. I will confess the error of my ways. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. But they're really doing things that are physics. Not necessarily because they were all bookish. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. We'll measure it." But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. Maybe it was a UFO driven by aliens." And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. Then, my final book, my most recent one, was Something Deeply Hidden. These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. Hopefully it'll work out. Do the same thing for a large scale structure and how it evolves. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. Sean Carroll. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. There was the James Franck Institute, which was separate. So, we wrote a paper. We can both quite easily put together a who's who of really top-flight physicists who did not get tenure at places like Harvard and Stanford, and then went on to do fundamental work at other excellent institutions, like University of Washington, or Penn, or all kinds of great universities. But then there are other times when you're stuck, and you can't even imagine looking at the equations on your sheet of paper. I love it. I haven't given it up yet. So, I did finally catch on, like, okay, I need to write things that other people think are interesting, not just me. I was in Sidney's office all the time. All of which is to say, once I got to Caltech, I did start working in broadening myself, but it was slow, and it wasn't my job. 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. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. Again, I was wrong over and over again. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. So, that was a benefit. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. No, quite the opposite. Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. That was great, a great experience. You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. It never really bothered me that much, honestly. And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. We don't know what to do with this." Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. That includes me. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. 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. Physics does give you that. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. And no one gave you advice along the lines of -- a thesis research project is really your academic calling card? It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. 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. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." It's just really, really hard." The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion", published in September 2022.[15]. [54] In this public dialogue, they discussed the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. Well, it's true. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. 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. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. It is January 4th, 2021. 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. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. Because I know, if you're working with Mark Wise, my colleague, and you're a graduate student, it's just like me working with George Field. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. It ended up being 48 videos, on average an hour long. So, even if it's a graduate-level textbook filled with equations, that is not what they want to see. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. I think to first approximation, no. And then, even within physics, do you see cosmology as the foundational physics to talk about the rest of physics, and all the rest of science in society? There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . And this time, first I had to do it all by myself, but because I was again foolishly ambitious, I typed up all the lecture notes, so equations and everything, before each lecture, Xeroxed them and handed them out. There's an equation you can point to. Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. Then why are you wasting my time? My mom was tickled. We hit it off immediately. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. There are not a lot of jobs for people like me, who are really pure theorists at National Labs like that. However, Sean Carroll doesn't only talk about science, he also talks about the philosophy of science. 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. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". That's what supervenience means. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. I didn't really know that could be a thing, but I was very, very impressed by it. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. In retrospect, there's two big things. Why don't people think that way? As long as it's about interesting ideas, I'm happy to talk about it. And we remained a contender through much of his tenure. Sean Carroll. What mattered was learning the material. Okay? 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. 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. For me, it's one big continuum, but not for anybody else. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? How do you understand all of these things? I did not succeed in that goal. It was July 4th. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. Chun filed an 18-page appeal to Vice Adm. Sean Buck, the Naval Academy . It would have been better for me. Again, I was wrong. Oh, kinds of physics. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. There are so many people at Chicago. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. The wonderful thing about it was that the boundaries were a little bit fuzzy. 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. That's when I have the most fun. It might fail, and I always try to say that very explicitly. 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. [8] He occasionally takes part in formal debates and discussions about scientific, religious and philosophical topics with a variety of people. You should apply." So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. Someone said it. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. Probably his most important work was on the interstellar and intergalactic medium. Fast forward to 2011. I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. 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. I remember, even before I got there, I got to pick out my office. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. Completely blindsided. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. This is what I do. It is remarkable. [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. The obvious choices were -- the theoretical cosmology effort was mostly split between Fermilab and the astronomy department at Chicago, less so in the physics department. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. There's a bunch. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. I will get water while you're doing that. And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Metaphysics to a philosopher just means studying the fundamental nature of reality. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. So, like I said, it was a long line of steel workers. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. But it was kind of overwhelming. So, let's get off the tenure thing. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. Like, I did it. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. I don't know if Plato counts, but he certainly was good at all these different things. It was very long. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. In fact, Jeffrey West, who is a former particle physicist who's now at the Santa Fe Institute, has studied this phenomenon quantitatively. I like the idea of debate. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. Having said all that, my goal is never to convert people into physicists. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. "The University of Georgia has been . But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. Not one of the ones that got highly cited. Again, in my philosophy of pluralism, there should be both kinds. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. But there definitely has been a shift. Absolutely. 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. But it's not what I do research on. They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. 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? 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. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? I said, "Well, yeah, I did. 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, I thought that graduate students just trying to learn general relativity -- didn't have a good book to go through. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. What does Research Professor entail to the larger audience out there that might not be aware of the different natures of titles within a university department? 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? They also had Bob Wald, who almost by himself was a relativity group. 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. It's much easier, especially online, to be snarky and condescending than it is to be openminded. "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. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. I think, both, actually. They were very bad at first. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. Now, you might ask, who cares? And now I know it. Payton announced he was leaving the Saints on Jan. 25, 2022; Schneider and Broncos GM George Paton began discussing . But other people have various ways of getting to the . 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. We don't understand dark matter and dark energy. But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. I was a good teacher. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. He turned down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, because he did not want to appear to be supporting a reconciliation between science and religion. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. No, not really. It was just a dump, and there was a lot of dumpiness. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. I think it's bad in the following way. First, on the textbook, what was the gap in general relativity that you saw that necessitated a graduate-level textbook? It's a lot of work if you do it right. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. But I don't remember what it was. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. We wrote a lot of papers together. 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. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. He explains the factors that led to his undergraduate education at Villanova, and his graduate work at Harvard, where he specialized in astronomy under the direction of George Field. It sounded very believable. It doesn't always work. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook.
why was sean carroll denied tenure
01. jul