And I did reflect on that option, and I decided on option B, that it was just not worth it to me to sacrifice five years of my life, even if I were doing good research, which hopefully I would do. 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. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. This is something that's respectable.". He's the one who edits all my books these days, so it worked out for us. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. 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." Reply Insider . Sean Carroll | Faculty Experts | Hub This is not a good attitude to have, but I thought I would do fine. So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. I would have gladly gone to some distant university. So, that was one big thing. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. There was Cumrun Vafa, one person who was looked upon as a bit of an aberration. When I got there, we wrote a couple of papers tighter. At least, I didn't when I was a graduate student. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. No, quite the opposite. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. I've only lived my life once, and who knows? The Broncos have since traded for Sean Payton, nearly two years after Wilson's trade list included the Saints. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. When I went to graduate school at Harvard, of course, it was graduate school, but I could tell that the undergraduate environment was entirely different. Planning, not my forte. Last month, l linked to a series of posts about my job search after tenure denial, and how I settled into my current job. There was no internet back then. Ten of those men and no women were successful. He wrote wonderful popular books. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? But undoubtedly, Sean, a byproduct of all your outreach work is to demonstrate that scientists are people -- that there isn't necessarily an agenda, that mistakes are made, and that all of the stuff for which conspiracies are made of, your work goes a long way in demonstrating that there's nothing to those ideas. You have an optimism that that's not true, and that what you're doing as a public intellectual is that you're nurturing and being a causative effect of those trend lines. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. I was really surprised." They are . Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. Someone said it. I really wanted to move that forward. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. Answer (1 of 6): Check out Quora User's answer to What PhDs are most in demand by universities? This transcript may not be quoted, reproduced or redistributed in whole or in part by any means except with the written permission of the American Institute of Physics. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. Or a biochemist, right? Especially if your academic performance has been noteworthy, being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers is the ultimate rejection of the person. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. Well, how would you know? But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. Powerful people from all over the place go there. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. It was really hard, because we know so much about theoretical physics now, that as soon as you propose a new idea, it's already ruled out in a million different ways. So, I'm really quite excited about this. What Is a Tenured Employee? Benefits of Earning This Status So, I did my best to take advantage of those circumstances. I think, now, as wonderful as Villanova was, and I can rhapsodize about what a great experience I had there, but it's nothing like going to a major, top notch university, again, just because of the other students who are around you. It was very small. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. Why Did Sean Carroll Denied Tenure? It was a lot of fun because there weren't any good books. That includes me. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. In fact, I did have this idea that experiencing new things and getting away was important. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. Some of them were, and I made some very good friends there, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Further Reflections on the Sean Carroll Debate - Biola University As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. This has been an absolutely awesome four hours. Euclid's laws work pretty well. In other words, did he essentially hand you a problem to work on for your thesis research, or were you more collaborative, or was he basically allowing you to do whatever you wanted on your own? But then when it comes to giving you tenure, they're making a decision not by what you've done for the last six years, but what you will do for the next 30 years. Like, several of them. He offered 13 pieces of . How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. There's an equation you can point to. I'll just put them on the internet. All the warning signs, all the red flags were there. So, he won the Nobel Prize, but I won that little bottle of port. It's an expense for me because as an effort to get the sound quality good, I give every guest a free microphone. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. Another bad planning on my part. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. How seriously is Sean Carroll taken? : r/AskPhysics - reddit Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. What Is It Like To Be Denied Tenure as a Professor? Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. So, despite the fact that I connected all the different groups, none of them were really centrally interested in what I did for a living. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. Did you connect with your father later in life? Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? Now, the academic titles. Recent tenure denial cases raise questions - Inside Higher Ed Well, most people got tenure. There was one formative experience, which was a couple of times while I was there, I sat in on Ed Bertschinger's meetings. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. It just never occurred to me that that would be a strike against me, but apparently it was a huge strike against me. Then, of course, the cosmology group was extremely active, but it was clearly in the midst of a shift from early universe cosmology to late universe cosmology at the time. Apply for that, we'll hire you for that. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. Actually, without expecting it, and honestly, between you and me, it won it not because I'm the best writer in the world, but because the Higgs boson is the most exciting particle in the world. Sean Carroll Height. This is an example of it. When there are scores of principals leaving, positions staying open for years and talented new hires being denied tenure, it is a sign of a power vacuum (or disinterest) at the top. 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. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . So, I had to go to David Gross, who by then was the director of KITP, and said, "Could you give me another year at Santa Barbara, because I just got stranded here a little bit?" I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . Very, very important. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. It became a big deal, and they generalized it from R plus one over R to f(R), any function of R. There's a whole industry out there now looking at f(R) gravity. I got a lot of books on astronomy. Onondaga County. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. Melville, NY 11747 So, again, I sort of brushed it off. It wasn't really clear. Like, that's a huge thing. This turns out to work pretty well in mathematics. That was the first book I wrote that appeared on the New York Times best seller list. I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. So, I went to a large public school. So, I was in my office and someone knocked on my door. Actually, I didn't write a paper with Sidney either. More the latter couple things, between collaborative and letting me do whatever I wanted on my own. I enjoyed that, but it wasn't my passion. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. It's challenging. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. So, I wonder, in what ways can you confirm that outside assumption, but also in reflecting on the past near year, what has been difficult that you might not have expected from all of this solitary work? There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. 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. Who knows what the different influences were, but that was the moment that crystalized it, when I finally got to say that I was an atheist. I can do it, and it is fun. It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. What you should do is, if you're a new faculty member in a department, within the first month of being there, you should have had coffee or lunch with every faculty member. He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. Not just that there are different approaches. Well, you parameterize gravitational forces by the curvature of space time, right? Bill Press did us a favor of nominally signing a piece of paper that said he would be the faculty member for this course. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. "The substance of what you're saying is really good, but you're so bad at delivering it. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. And I want to write philosophy papers, and I want to do a whole bunch of other things.
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