why was sean carroll denied tenure

We don't know what to do with this." Sean Carroll's advice on How to get tunure | Physics Forums Carroll, S.B. I will confess the error of my ways. Sean Carroll's Mindscape - Wondery | Premium Podcasts I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. 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. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. Now, you might ask, who cares? Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. And they said, "Sure!" I will get water while you're doing that. Don't just talk to your colleagues at the university but talk more widely. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. You should apply." The original typescript is available. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). Yes. Like, where's the energy coming from? I had great professors at Villanova, but most of the students weren't that into the life of the mind. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. The Santa Fe Institute is this unique place. Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub I lucked into it, once again. It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. I did not succeed in that goal. Interview with a Physicist: Sean Carroll | Physics Forums Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? That's not data. 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. It's my personal choice. If there's less matter than that, then space has a negative curvature. 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. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. I just don't want to do that anymore. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. For the biologist, see, Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 10:29, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, "Caltech Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics Faculty Page", "Atheist Physicist Sean Carroll: An Infinite Number of Universes Is More Plausible Than God", "On Sean Carroll's Case for Naturalism and against Theism", "William Lane Craig & Sean Carroll debate God & Cosmology - Unbelievable? So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. I think the departments -- the physics department, the English department, whatever -- they serve an obvious purpose in universities, but they also have obvious disadvantages. There's good physics reasons. I'd like to start first with your parents. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. It's one thing to do an hour long interview, and Santa Fe is going to play a big role here, because they're very interested in complex systems. So, they knew everything that I had done. 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. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. You can read any one of them on a subway ride. It's a research institute in Santa Fe that is devoted to the study of complexity in all its forms. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. So, that's one important implication. Let's pick people who are doing exciting research. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? I was awarded a Packard fellowship which was this wonderful thing where you get like half a million dollars to spend over five years on whatever you want. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. 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. How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. We'll have to see. So, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. Sean, for my last question, looking forward, I want to reflect on your educational trajectory, and the very uncertain path from graduate school to postdoc, to postdoc to the University of Chicago. They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. So, it was really just a great place. Now, we did a terrible job teaching it because we just asked them to read far too much. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. 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 . I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. 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. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. "The University of Georgia has been . Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. Was something like a Princeton or a Harvard, was that even on your radar as an 18 year old? Do you want to put them all in the same basket? We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. That's what supervenience means. So, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. That was great, a great experience. It was true that as you looked at larger and larger scales in the universe, you saw more and more matter, not just on an absolute scale, but also relative to what you needed to see. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. So, that's, to me, a really good chance of making a really important contribution. So, it's like less prestige, but I have this benefit that I get this benefit that I have all this time to myself. November 16, 2022 9:15 am. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. He is a man of above-average stature. 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. 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, religion, and politics; as a writer of popular science books; and as an innovator in the realm of creating science content online. It just so happened, I could afford going to Villanova, and it was just easy and painless, so I did it. 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. I think, both, actually. 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 think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. Some Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. 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. No, not really. Planning, not my forte. If the most obvious fact about the candidate you're bringing forward is they just got denied tenure, and the dean doesn't know who this person is, or the provost, or whatever, they're like, why don't you hire someone who was not denied tenure. 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. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there.