why was sean carroll denied tenure
That's what really makes me feel successful. Let's put it that way. Everything is going great. Should I explain what that is, or should we assume that people know what that means? Even back then, there was part of me that said, okay, you only have so many eggs. This is December 1997. So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" I'm not quite sure I can tell the difference, but working class is probably more accurate. That's all they want to do, and they get so deep into it that no one else can follow them, and they do their best to explain. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. Absolutely. I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. Did you do that self-consciously? Recent Books. So, that's why it's exciting to see what happens. There are things the rest of the world is interested in. There were two sort of big national universities that I knew that were exceptions to that, which were University of Chicago, and Rice University. At Los Alamos, yes. They're rare. 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. SLAC has done a wonderful job hiring string theorists, for example. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. No sensible person doubted they would happen. What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. What I would much rather be able to do successfully, and who knows how successful it is, but I want physics to be part of the conversation that everyone has, not just physicists. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Different people are asking different questions: what do you do? I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. To second approximation, I care a lot about the public image of science. Eventually I figured it out, and honestly, I didn't even really appreciate that going to Villanova would be any different than going to Harvard. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. 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. No, not really. So, my other graduate school colleagues, Brian had gone to the University of Arizona, Ian Dell'Antonio, who was another friend of mine, went to, I think, Haverford. 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. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. It was July 4th. Sean Carroll, bless his physicist's soul, decided to respond to a tweet by Colin Wright (asserting the binary nature of sex) by giving his (Carroll's) own take in on the biological nature of sex. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. By reputation only. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. But I loved science because I hung out at the public library and read a lot of books about blackholes and quarks and the Big Bang. It would have been better for me. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. So, we had like ten or twelve students in our class. In many ways, it was a great book. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. She said, "John is right, and I was also right. I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. Part of it is what I alluded to earlier. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. When I went to MIT, it was even worse. No one told you that, or they did, and you rebelled against it. So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. But, you know, I do think that my religious experiences, such as they were, were always fairly mild. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. Now, in reality, maybe once every six months meant once a year, but at least three times before my thesis defense, my committee had met. The actual job requirements -- a big part of it, the part that I take most seriously, and care most about -- is advising graduate students. 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. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. And it's not just me. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. And the answer is, to most people, there is. I didn't even get on any shortlists the next year. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. It was a very casual procedure. So, I realized right from the start, I would not be able to do it at all if I assume that the audience didn't understand anything about equations, if I was not allowed to use equations. I think that's the right way to put it. Other than being interesting at the time, theoretical physics questions. Based on my experience as an Instructor at a major research university and now tenure-track faculty at a major public university, I would say that all of his major points are . I think it's part of a continuum. Absolutely brilliant course. Is writing a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, might that have been perceived as a bit of a bold move for an assistant professor? So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. 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. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . That was my first choice. So, there was a little window to write a book about the Higgs boson. And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" I've appeared on a lot of television documentaries since moving to L.A. That's a whole sausage you don't want to see made, really, in terms of modern science documentaries. So, cosmologists were gearing up, 1997, late '90s, for all the new flood of data that would come in to measure parameters using the cosmic microwave background. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. I clearly made the worst of the three choices in terms of the cosmology group, the relativity group, the particle theory group, because I thought in my navet that I should do the thing that was the most challenging and least natural to me, because then I would learn the most. So, they actually asked me as a postdoc to teach the GR course. But within the course of a week -- coincidence problem -- Vikram Duvvuri, who was a graduate student in Chicago, knocked on my door, and said, "Has anyone ever thought of taking R and adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity and seeing what would happen?" Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? In other words, if you were an experimental condensed matter physicist, is there any planet where it would be feasible that you would be talking about democracy and atheism and all the other things you've talked about? And this was all happening during your Santa Barbara years. So, like I said, I really love topology. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. So, I was behind already. You should apply." Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. My teacher, who was a wonderful guy, thinks about it a second and goes, "Did you ever think about how really hard it is to teach people things?" Those poor biologists had no chance that year. It was really a quite difficult transition to embrace and accept videoconferencing as an acceptable medium. So, then, I could just go wherever I wanted. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. 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. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. But it should have been a different conversation anyway, because I said, well, therefore it's not interesting. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. That's not all of it. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. He offered 13 pieces of . That just didn't happen. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." I had the best thesis committee ever. Mark and Vikram and I and Michael Turner, who was Vikram's advisor. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. Physics does give you that. Let's put it that way. It's my personal choice. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. I have a short attention span. They were all graduate students at the time. The theorists said, well, you just haven't looked hard enough. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? This is a non-tenured position. Marc Kamionkowski proposed the Moore Center for Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. There were hints of it. That was a glimpse of what could be possible. But there definitely has been a shift. I'm sure the same thing happens if you're an economic historian. Here is my thought process. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. I had never heard of him before. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. It's funny when that happens. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. I wrote a big review article about it. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" Or other things. The system has benefited them. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. So, that was a benefit. Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. I'd written a bunch of interesting papers, so I was a hot property on the job market. I taught what was called a big picture course. I did various things. Right. Sean Carroll Height. But interestingly, the kind of philosophy I liked was moral and political philosophy. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. Well, one ramification of that is technological. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. No one does that. But that's okay. 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. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. And at least a year passed. Anyway, even though we wrote that paper and I wrote my couple paragraphs, and the things I said were true, as. Actually, your suspicion is on-point. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. I remember that. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the .