why was sean carroll denied tenuresecrets maroma preferred club worth it

You don't really need to do much for those. And I've guessed. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. If you just plug in what is the acceleration due to gravity, from Newton's inverse square law? I think that responsibility is located in the field, not on individuals. 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 got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. Field. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? If they do, then I'd like to think I will jump back into it. In other words, of course, as the population goes up, there's more ideas. The astronomy department at Harvard was a wonderful, magical place, which was absolutely top notch. It was hard to figure out what the options were. Law school was probably my second choice at the time. Sean, I wonder if you stumbled upon one of the great deals in the astronomy and physics divide. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. Sean, I'm sorry to interrupt, but in the way that you described the discovery of accelerating universe as unparalleled in terms of its significance, would you put the discovery of the Higgs at a lower tier? 1 Physics Ellipse He was a very senior guy. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. Here is my thought process. Brian, who was a working class observational astronomer said, "No we won't. They hired Wayne Hu at the same time they hired me, as a theorist, to work on the microwave background. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. I have a short attention span. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. And it was great. The obvious ideas, you have some scalar field which was dubbed quintessence, so slowly, slowly rolling, and has a potential energy that is almost constant. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. I can do it, and it is fun. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? 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. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." 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. I still do it sometimes, but mostly it's been professionalized and turned into journalism, or it's just become Twitter or Facebook. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. In 2017, Carroll presented an argument for rejecting certain cosmological models, including those with Boltzmann brains, on the basis that they are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. 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. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? 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. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? I think I did not really feel that, honestly. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. This is a non-tenured position. They basically admitted that. But it's worked pretty well for me. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. Young people. Maybe it's them. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? We're not developing a better smart phone. But to the extent that you've had this exposure, Harvard and then MIT, and then you were at Santa Barbara, one question with Chicago, and sort of more generally as you're developing your experience in academic physics, when you got to Chicago, was there a particular approach to physics and astronomy that you did not get at either of the previous institutions? Do you have any pointers to work that's already been done?" I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. The discovery was announced in July. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. I don't want them to use their built in laptop microphone, so I send them a microphone. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. It would have been better for me. Carroll has a B.S. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know. So, there were all these PhD astronomers all over the place at Harvard in the astronomy department. What was he working on when you first met him? It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. They were like, how can you not give it to the Higgs boson book, right? Some of them might be. That's what really makes me feel successful. 1.11 Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. 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. So much knowledge, and helpful, but very intimidating if you're a student. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. In talking to people and sort of sharing what I learned. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Soon afterward, they hired Andrey Kravtsov, who does these wonderful numerical simulations. We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. 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. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. These were not the exciting go-go days that you might -- well, we had some both before and after. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. Having said that, the slight footnote is you open yourself up, if you are a physicist who talks about other things, to people saying, "Stick to physics." Never did he hand me a problem and walk away. Yeah, no, good. 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? When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. It's a junior faculty job. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." I don't know how public knowledge this is. They all had succeeded to an enormous extent, because they're all really, really brilliant, and had made great contributions. My mom worked as a secretary for U.S. Steel. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." No one told me. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. There were hints of it. Sean, did you enjoy teaching undergraduates? Yeah. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. So, let's get off the tenure thing. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. You go from high school, you're in a college, it's your first exposure to a whole bunch of new things, you get to pick and choose. At Los Alamos, yes. In his response to critics he has made a number of interesting claims . [48][49][50] The participants were Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg, Terrence Deacon and Don Ross with James Ladyman. We teach them all these wonderful techniques and we never quite let them apply those techniques they learn to these big interdisciplinary ideas. Not especially, no. Was your sense that religion was not discussed because it was private, or because being an atheist in scientific communities was so non-controversial that it wasn't even something worth discussing? 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. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. It wasn't fun, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't the end of anything really, other than my employment at UMass. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. He and Jennifer Chen posit that the Big Bang is not a unique occurrence as a result of all of the matter and energy in the universe originating in a singularity at the beginning of time, but rather one of many cosmic inflation events resulting from quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy in a cold de Sitter space. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. Whereas the accelerated universe was a surprise. And he says, "Yeah, I saw that. What should we do? Carroll was dishonest on two important points. I think that the vast majority of benefit that students get from their university education is from interacting with other students. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. Thanks very much. And he's like, "Sure." I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. But, I mean, I have no shortage of papers I want to write in theoretical physics. I got the Packard Fellowship. And I said, "Yeah, sure." There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. It might have been by K.C. It's way easier to be on this side, answering questions rather than asking them. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. They didn't know. The topic of debate was "The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology". I did always have an interest in -- I don't want to use the word outreach because that sort of has formal connotations, but in reaching out. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. Not just open science like we can read everybody's papers, but doing science in public. It is January 4th, 2021. These two groups did it, and we could do a whole multi-hour thing on the politics of these two groups, and the whole thing. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. If I'm going to spend my time writing popular books, like I said before, I want my outreach to be advancing in intellectual argument. That's a different me. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. Get on with your life. You took religion classes, and I took religion classes, and I actually enjoyed them immensely. It's just like being a professor. Well, Harvard -- the astronomy department, which was part and parcel of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- so, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory joined together in the 1970s to form this big institution, which I still think might be the largest collection of astronomy PhDs, in the United States, anyway. I think people like me should have an easier time. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. Yeah, it's what you dream about academia being like. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? One of these papers, we found an effect that was far too small to ever be observed, so we wrote about it. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. They do not teach either. Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. 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, the year before my midterm evaluation, I spent almost all my time doing two things. I purposely stayed away from more speculative things. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? I pretend that they're separate. I also started a new course, general relativity for undergraduates, which had not been taught before, and they loved it. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. You know the answer to that." And I didn't because I thought I wasn't ready yet. I thought maybe I had not maxed out my potential as a job market candidate. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? Is your sense that your academic scholarly vantage point of cosmology allows for some kind of a privileged or effective position within public debate because so much of the basis of religion is based on the assumption that there must be a God because a universe couldn't have created itself? Like I said, it just didn't even occur to me. 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? I was unburdened by knowing how impressive he was. We had people from England who had gone to Oxford, and we had people who had gone to Princeton and Harvard also. ", "Is God a good theory? Mr. Tompkins, and One Two Three Infinity was one of the books that I read when I was in high school. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. The way that you describe your dissertation as a series of papers that were stapled together, I wonder the extent to which you could superimpose that characterization on the popular books that you've published over the past almost 20 years now. I think the final thing to say, since I do get to be a little bit personal here, is even though I was doing cosmology and I was in an astronomy department, still in my mind, I was a theoretical physicist. Carroll, S.B. 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. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again.

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