why was sean carroll denied tenure

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 that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. It was hard to figure out what the options were. Absolutely. This is what I do. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. It was fine. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. This is literally the words that I was told. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. He is a man of above-average stature. That can happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently at a place like Caltech than someplace else. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. They need it written within six months so it can be published before the discovery is announced. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. Physics does give you that. But maybe it could. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. So, I said, "Yes, I proposed a book and your wife rejected it.". I was also on the ground floor theoretically, because I had written this paper with Bill Press that had gotten attention. 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, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. The production quality was very bad, and the green screen didn't work very well. You're so boring and so stilted and so stiff." A video of the debate can be seen here. We'll measure it." But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. So, here's another funny story. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. Who knows? He has written extensively on models of dark energy and its interactions with ordinary matter and dark matter, as well as modifications of general relativity in cosmology. It's not just trendiness. 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? It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. Sean Carroll. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? We don't care what you do with it." Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. Again, I had great people at MIT. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. He was doing intellectual work in the process of public outreach, which is really, really hard, and he was just a master at it as well as being an extremely accomplished planetary scientist, and working with NASA and so forth. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. So, the string theorists judged her like they would be judging Cumrun Vafa, or Ed Witten. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. I won't say a know-it-all attitude, because I don't necessarily think I knew it all, but I did think that I knew what was best for myself. I really took the opportunity to think as broadly as possible. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. Absolutely, for me, I'm an introvert. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. I'm on the DOE grant at both places, etc. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. Be prolific and reliable. It's not overturning all of physics. [46] Carroll also asserts that the term methodological naturalism is an inaccurate characterisation of science, that science is not characterised by methodological naturalism but by methodological empiricism.[47]. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. And, you know, video sixteen got half a million views, and it was about gravity, but it was about gravity using tensors and differential geometry. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. There's an equation you can point to. 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. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. A Surprise Point of Agreement With Sean Carroll No, not really. I love it. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. Later on, I wrote another paper that sort of got me my faculty jobs that pointed out that dark energy could have exactly the same effect. 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. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? No, you're completely correct. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. You should apply." They saw the writing on the wall. So, that's what he would do. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. The unions were anathema. The discovery was announced in July. Thank goodness. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. [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. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. I think that it's important to do different things, but for a purpose. No, not really. 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.

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