I'm the kind of person who would stop writing papers and do other things. There were two that were especially good. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. But when I was in Santa Barbara, I was at the epicenter. During this migration, the following fields associated with interviews may be incomplete: Institutions, Additional Persons, and Subjects. You can't remember the conversation that sparked them. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. There's very promising interesting work being done by string theorists and other people doing AdS/CFT and wormholes, and tensor networks, and things like that. If I had pursued certain opportunities, I could have gotten tenured. The four of us wrote a paper.
What is it like to be denied tenure as a professor? - Quora 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. When I went to MIT, it was even worse. No, not really. They come in different varieties. [29], Carroll is married to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the former director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.[30]. It's not just trendiness. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. You nerded out entirely. There's always exceptions to that. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. 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. And she had put her finger on it quite accurately, because already, by then, by 2006, I had grown kind of tired of the whole dark energy thing. So, my interest in the physics of democracy is really because democracies are complex systems, and I was struck by this strange imbalance between economics and politics. It's not good time management, but we did it and we enjoyed it. You have the equation. So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. What were the most interesting topics at that time? 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. Yeah, absolutely. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. We wrote a little particle physics model of dark matter that included what is now called dark energy interacting with each other, and so forth. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. 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. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. 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. 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. I've done it. So, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. I just drifted away very, very gradually. Carroll received his PhD in astronomy in 1993 from Harvard University, where his advisor was George B. So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. What are we going to do? And number two, I did a lot of organizing of a big international conference, Cosmo '02, that I was the main organizer of. It's really the biggest, if not only source of money in a lot of areas I care about.
Cornel West Says Harvard Denied Him Tenure Consideration - HuffPost No, I cannot in good conscience do that. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. It really wasn't, honestly, until my second postdoc in Santa Barbara, that I finally learned that it's just as important to do these things for reason, for a point. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. It is incredibly draining for me to do it. It won the Royal Society Prize for Best Science Book of the Year, which is a very prestigious thing. 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. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! Suite 110 I very intentionally said, "This is too much for anyone to read." You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. What am I going to do? Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. So, I would become famous if they actually discovered that. But still, it was a very, very exciting time. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. 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. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? The statement added, "This failure is especially . They succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. There are so many people at Chicago. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. Thank you for inviting me on. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss.
Moving-tenure-denial - Chemical & Engineering News So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. But there's also, again, very obvious benefits to having some people who are not specialists, who are more generalists, who are more interdisciplinary. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. A nontrivial fraction of tenure-track faculty are denied tenure, well over the standard 5% threshold for Type I errors that we use in the sciences. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. No one would buy that book, so we're not going to do it." 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? It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. But other people have various ways of getting to the . We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. In part, it's because they're read by the host who the audience has developed a trusting relationship with. Those would really cause re-thinks in a deep way. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. They need it written within six months so it can be published before the discovery is announced. Again, I was wrong. There was Cumrun Vafa, who had been recently hired as a young assistant professor. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. But now, I had this goal of explaining away both dark matter and dark energy. My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write.
Tenure Denial Sparks Protests at Chicago-Kent College of Law; Legal It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. Sean, as you just demonstrated, atheism is a complex proposition. Graduate school is a different thing. That's a tough thing to do. Is that a common title for professors at the Santa Fe Institute? 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. As a result, it did pretty well sales-wise, and it won a big award. I did not have it as a real priority, but if I did something, that's what I wanted to do. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? 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. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. And that's the only thing you do. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy.
What are the Different Reasons for Being Denied Tenure? The system has benefited them. What should we do? And then, both Alan Guth and Eddie Farhi from MIT trundled up. I really do appreciate the interactiveness, the jumping back and forth. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. There is the Templeton Foundation, which has been giving out a lot of money. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. So, my job was to talk about everything else, a task for which I was woefully unsuited, as a particle physics theorist, but someone who was young and naive and willing to take on new tasks. 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. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. So, thank you so much. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. Someone asked some question, and I think it might have been about Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. 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. At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. That's really the lesson I want to get across here. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. 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. 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. It was a big hit to. [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. You don't really need to do much for those. That is, as an astronomy student, you naturally had to take all kinds of physics classes, but physics majors didn't necessarily have to take all kinds of astronomy classes. There are so many, and it's very easy for me to admit that I suffer from confirmation biases, but it's very hard for me to tell you which ones they are, because we all each individually think that we are perfectly well-calibrating ourselves against our biases, otherwise we would change them in some way. So, I'm really quite excited about this. 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. 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. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. They chew you up and spit you out. And the answer is, to most people, there is. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. So, in that sense, technology just hasn't had a lot to say because we haven't been making a lot of discoveries, so we don't need to worry about that. 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. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. It will never be the largest. We don't know what to do with this." Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. We could discover what the dark matter is. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. 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 . He was in the midst of this, sort of, searching period himself. Martin White. "Tenure can be risk averse and hostile to interdisciplinarity. There haven't been that many people who have been excellent at all three at once. Wildly enthusiastic reception. This didn't shut up the theorists. It's not what I want to do. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. [53][third-party source needed]. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. But also, even though, in principal, the sound quality should be better because I bring my own microphones, I don't have any control over the environment. And part of it was because no one told me. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. Measure all the matter in the universe. At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. It was a tough decision, but I made it. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. Dutton, $29.
Tenure denial, and how early-career researchers can survive it I say this as someone who has another Sean Carroll, who is a famous biologist, and I get emails for him. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. What was your thesis research on? 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. Or a biochemist, right? I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. 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? There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. 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." 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. But that's okay. That's absolutely true. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. This is also the time when the Department of Energy is starting to fully embrace astrophysics, and to a lesser extent, cosmology, at the National Laboratories. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. I like the idea of debate. I wrote a big review article about it. This is something that's respectable.". It used to be the case that there was a close relationship between discoveries in fundamental physics and advances in technology, whether it was mechanics, electromagnetism, or quantum mechanics. You know, I wish I knew. So, that would happen. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. [13] He is also the author of four popular books: From Eternity to Here about the arrow of time, The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself about ontology, and Something Deeply Hidden about the foundations of quantum mechanics. But in the books I write, in the podcasts I do, in the blog or whatever, I'm not just explaining things or even primarily explaining things. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. 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. A lot of theoretical physics is working within what we know to predict the growth of structure, or whatever. Again, rather than trying to appeal to the largest number of people, and they like it. Then, I'm happy to admit, if someone says, "Oh, you have to do a podcast interview," it's like, ah, I don't want to do this now. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. So, I said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? So, Ted and I said, we will teach general relativity as a course. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. Certainly, no one academic in my family.
Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? Sean Carroll was denied tenure at University of Chicago, but he - Quora They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. 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. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. These were people who were at my level. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. So, once again, I can't complain about the intellectual environment that that represented. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. We don't understand economics or politics. Let's go back to the happier place of science. The thing that I was not able to become clear on for a while was the difference between physics and astrophysics. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. All my graduate students were able to get their degrees. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. He was a very senior guy. Sean, I'm curious if you think podcasting is a medium that's here to stay, or are we in a podcast bubble right now, and you're doing an amazing job riding it? In some cases, tenure may be denied due to the associate professor's lack of diplomacy or simply the unreasonable nature of tenured professors. And the High-z supernova team, my friends, Bob Kirshner, and Brian, and Adam, and so forth, came to me, and were like, "You know, you're a theorist. So, I don't have any obligations to teach students. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. We might have met at a cosmology conference.