why was sean carroll denied tenuresteve lamacq health problems

And we started talking, and it was great. You know, I wish I knew. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. Our senior year in high school, there was a calculus class. You've got to find the intersection. A few years after I got there, Bruce Winstein, who also has passed away, tragically, since then, but he founded what was at the time called the Center for Cosmological Physics and is now the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at Chicago. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. Okay? For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. Or there was. You'd need to ask a more specific question, because that's just an overwhelming number of simulations that happened when I got there. (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 . You can't get a non-tenured job. And it's not just me. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. And it has changed my research focus, because the thing that I learned -- the idea that you should really write papers that you care about and also other people care about but combined with the idea that you should care about things that matter in some way other than just the rest of the field matters. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Some have a big effect on you, some you can put aside. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. So, we wrote a little bit about that, and he was always interested in that. 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. Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? That's not going to lead us to a theory of dark matter, or whatever. Maybe it's them. And at least a year passed. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. Then, it was just purely about what was the best intellectual fit. I'm not going to really worry about it. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. 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, George was randomly assigned to me. 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. Reply Insider . So, thank you so much. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? I talked about topological defects, and it was good work, solid work, but they were honestly -- and this is the sort of weird thing -- they said, after I gave the talk and everything, "Look, everyone individually likes you, but no one is sure where you belong." I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. But there were postdocs. 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. You have the equation. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." Maybe not even enough to qualify as a tradition. We don't care what you do with it." Mark and I continued collaborating when we both became faculty members, and we wrote some very influential papers while we were doing that. That's a different me. +1 516.576.2200, Contact | Staff Directory | Privacy Policy. So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. I'm not someone who thinks there's a lone eccentric genius who's going to be idiosyncratic and overthrow the field. Yes, I think so. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. What I discovered in the wake of this paper I wrote about the arrow of time is a whole community of people I really wasn't plugged into before, doing foundations of physics. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth I think to first approximation, no. Part of my finally, at last, successful attempt to be more serious on the philosophical side of things, I'm writing a bunch of invited papers for philosophy-edited volumes. Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? People didn't take him seriously. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. Phew, this is a tough position to be in. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. Institute for Theoretical Physics. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. 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. I went on expeditions with the dinosaur hunters as a public outreach thing. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. Once that happened, I got several different job offers. Again, I was wrong over and over again. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. You're just too old for that. He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. Sean Carroll. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. You have enough room to get it right. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. Why don't people think that way? It was so clear to me that I did everything they wanted me to do that I just didn't try to strategize. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. And he said, "Yes, sure." He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. I have a short attention span. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. There aren't that many people who, sort of, have as their primary job, professor at the Santa Fe Institute. ", "2014 National Convention Los Angeles Freedom From Religion Foundation", "Responding to Sean Carroll: What If There Had Been a Camera at the Resurrection? I think it's gone by now. I think it's more that people don't care. So far so good. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. It was clear that there was an army that was marching toward a goal, and they did it. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. I have no problems with that. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. But Bill's idea was, look, we give our undergraduates these first year seminars, interdisciplinary, big ideas, very exciting, and then we funnel them into their silos to be disciplinary. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? My mom was tickled. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. Go longer. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. 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. They're a little bit less intimidated. Sean, another topic I love to historicize, where it was important and where it was trendy, is string theory. Let's just take the risk, and if they don't work out they won't get tenure." The tenure decision is very different than the hiring decision. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. Coincidentally, Wilson's preferred replacement for Carroll was reportedly Sean Payton, who had recently resigned from his role as the head coach of the New Orleans Saints.Almost a year later . Some of them might be. Maybe I fall short of being excellent at them, but at least I'm enthusiastic about them. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit And it doesn't work well from your approach of being exuberant and wanting to just pursue the fun stuff to work on. Where are the equations I can solve? Let's put it that way. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. Like, I did it. When I was a grad student and a postdoc, I believed the theoretical naturalness argument that said clearly the universe is going to be flat. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. I played a big role in the physics frontier center we got at Chicago. So, I gave a lot of thought to that question. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. But the closest to his wheelhouse and mine were cosmological magnetic fields. A defense of philosophical naturalism, a brand of naturalism, like a poetic naturalism. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. But I don't remember what it was. 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. Or, I could say, "Screw it." This could be great. I'm always amazed by physics and astronomy [thesis] defenses, because it seems like the committee never asks the kinds of questions like, what do you see as your broader contributions to the field? A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? I think there are plenty of physicists. But Villanova offered me full tuition, and it was closer, so the cost of living would be less. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. But very few people in my field jump on that bandwagon. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. The polarization of light from the CMB might be rotated just a little bit as it travels through space. 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. . 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. I was thinking of a research project -- here is the thought process. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. 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. That's the job. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. So, I want to not only write papers with them, but write papers that are considered respectable for the jobs they want to eventually get. It also revealed a lot about the character of my colleagues: some avoiding me as if I had a contagious disease, others offering warm, friendly hands. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that."

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