why was sean carroll denied tenure why was sean carroll denied tenure

Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? 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, 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. First year seminars to sort of explore big ideas in different ways. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. 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. They decide to do physics for a living. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? So, I want to do something else. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? Well, the answer is yes, absolutely. My grandfather was a salesman, etc. God doesn't exist, and that has enormous consequences for how we live our lives. This is December 1997. I think that I read papers by very smart people, smarter than me, doing cutting edge work on quantum gravity, and so forth, and I still find that they're a little hamstrung by old fashioned, classical ideas. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. Get on with your life. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. You can mostly get reimbursed, but I'm terrible about getting reimbursed. Again, in my philosophy of pluralism, there should be both kinds. So, you were already working with Alan Guth as a graduate student. 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. His research papers include models of, and experimental constraints on, violations of Lorentz invariance; the appearance of closed timelike curves in general relativity; varieties of topological defects in field theory; and cosmological dynamics of extra spacetime dimensions. It seems that when you finally got to Caltech, it all clicked for you. Not so they could do it. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. He had to learn it. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. So, Villanova was basically chosen for me purely on economic reasons. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. What can I write down? The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. But he was very clear. I have the financial ability to do that now, with the books and the podcast. Some of them might be. So far so good. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. 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. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. I wonder if in some ways you're truly old fashioned in the way that what we would call scientists today, in the 17th and 18th century, they called natural philosophers. Okay, with all that clarified, its funny that you should say that, because literally two days ago, I finished writing a paper on exactly this issue. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. It's a junior faculty job. I'll just put them on the internet. Yes, it is actually a very common title for Santa Fe affiliated people. I do firmly believe that. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. Being a string theorist seemed to be a yes or no proposition. The cosmological constant would be energy density in an empty space that is absolutely strictly constant as an energy. His recent posting on the matter (at . Quantum physics is about multiplicity. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. The paper was on what we called the cosmological constant, which is this idea that empty space itself can have energy and push the universe apart. 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? This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. Number one, writing that textbook that I wrote on general relativity, space time and geometry. And he says, "Yes, everything the Santa Fe Institute has ever done counts." Sean, we've brought the narrative right up to the present, so much so that we know exactly what you should be working on right now. Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. So, then, you can go out and measure the mass density of the universe and compare that with what is called the critical density, what you need to make the universe flat. If you want to tell me that is not enough to explain the behavior of human beings and their conscious perceptions, then the burden is on you -- not you, personally, David, but whoever is making this argument -- the burden is on them to tell me why that equation is wrong. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? The astronomy department was just better than the physics department at that time. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. What should we do? You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! I pretend that they're separate. He'd already retired from being the director of the Center for Astrophysics, so you could have forgiven him for kicking back a little bit, but George's idea of a good time is to crank out 30 pages of handwritten equations on some theory that we're thinking about. You would have negative energy particles appearing in empty space. I was still thought to be a desirable property. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. They were very bad at first. Past tenure cases have been filed over such reasons as contractual issues, gender discrimination, race discrimination, fraud, defamation and more. Walking the Tenure Tightrope. The specific thing I've been able to do in Los Angeles is consult on Hollywood movies and TV shows, but had I been in Boston, or New York, or San Francisco, I would have found something else to do. So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. He was an editor at the Free Press, and he introduced himself, and we chatted, and he said, "Do you want to write a book?" I love it. Washington was just a delight. So, there's three quarters in an academic year. 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. Rather, they were discussing current limits to origin's research. I was in Sidney's office all the time. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. Well, as usual, I bounced around doing a lot of things, but predictably, the things that I did that people cared about the most were in this -- what I was hired to do, especially the theory of the accelerating universe and dark energy. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. So, they had already done their important papers showing the universe was accelerating, and then they want to do this other paper on, okay, if there is dark energy, as it was then labeled, which is a generalization of the idea of a cosmological constant. I had done what Stephen [Morrow] asked for the Higgs boson book, and it won a prize. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. But it's hard to do that measurement for reasons that Brian anticipated. So, it was very tempting, but Chicago was much more like a long-term dream. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. I was in on the ground floor, because I had also worked on theoretical models of it. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. Sean Carroll is a Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins who explores how the world works at the deepest level. I will." So the bad news is. I can do cosmology, and I'd already had these lecture notes on relativity. That's how philosophy goes. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. 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?" In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. One option was to not just -- irrespective of what position I might have taken, to orient my research career toward being the most desirable job candidate I could be. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. I'm curious if your more recent interests in politics are directly a reflection of what we've seen in science and public policy with regard to the pandemic. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. That's why I said, "To first approximation." So, I think that when I was being considered for tenure, people saw that I was already writing books and doing public outreach, and in their minds, that meant that five years later, I wouldn't be writing any more papers. 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. That's all it is. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. That's a tough thing to do. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." But that gave me some cache when I wanted to write my next book. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. So, that's how I started working with Alan. 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. 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? 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 . That just didn't happen. It's still pretty young. The guy, whoever the person in charge of these things, says, "No, you don't get a wooden desk until you're a dean." 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. So, for the last part of our talk, I want to ask a few broadly retrospective questions about your career, and then a few looking forward. A lot of my choices throughout my career have not been conscious. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. That's it. Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. Even from the physics department to the astronomy department was a 15-minute walk. The space of possibilities is the biggest space that we human beings can contemplate. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. 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. Absolutely the same person.". I assume this was really a unique opportunity up until this point to really interact with undergraduate students. Notice: We are in the process of migrating Oral History Interview metadata to this new version of our website. I'll be back. We have been very, very bad about letting people know that. So, I did, and they became very popular. Well, I'm not sure that I ever did get advice. Benefits of tenure. You don't get that, but there's clearly way more audience in a world as large as ours for people who are willing to work a little bit. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. Dan Freedman, who was one of the inventors of supergravity, took me under his wing. Sean Carroll. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. We'll figure it out. I said, "Yeah, don't worry. This morning Wilson responded to a report in the Athletic that said he asked the organization to fire both head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider last offseason. 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. You really, really need scientists or scholars who care enough about academia to help organize it, and help it work, and start centers and institutes, and blaze new trails for departments. It moved away. There's always exceptions to that. So, no, it is not a perfect situation, and no I'm not going to be there long-term. You really have to make a case. Then, through the dualities that Seiberg and Witten invented, and then the D-brane revolution that Joe Polchinski brought about, suddenly, the second super string revolution was there, right? Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. What you would guess is the universe is expanding, and how fast it's expanding is related to that amount of density of the universe in a very particular way. At the time, . So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. You know the answer to that." 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. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. Would I be interested in working on it with him? Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . Its equations describe multiple possible outcomes for a measurement in the subatomic realm. But I do think that there's room for optimism that a big re-think, from the ground up, based on taking quantum mechanics seriously and seeing where you go from there, could have important implications for both of these issues. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. You don't get paid for doing it. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. So, again, I sort of brushed it off. And I think that I need to tell my students that that's the kind of attitude that the hiring committees and the tenure committees have. I think all three of those things are valid and important. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. 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. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. 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. [11], He has appeared on the History Channel's The Universe, Science Channel's Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Closer to Truth (broadcast on PBS),[12] and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. 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. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. The polarization of light from the CMB might be rotated just a little bit as it travels through space. When you come up for tenure, the prevailing emotion is one of worry. In retrospect, there's two big things. So, Sean, what were your initial impressions when you got to Chicago? He has also worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the many-worlds interpretation, including a derivation of the Born rule for probabilities. So, taste matters. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. I'm never going to stop writing papers in physics journals, philosophy journals, whatever. 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. It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. That's a romance, that's not a reality. In other words, you have for a long time been quite happy to throw your hat in the ring with regard to science and religion and things like that, but when the science itself gets this know-nothingness from all kinds of places in society, I wonder if that's had a particular intellectual impact on you. I just drifted away very, very gradually. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. I don't think the Templeton Foundation is evil. The specific way in which that manifests itself is that when you try to work, or dabble, if you want to put it that way, in different areas, and there are people at your institution who are experts in those specific areas, they're going to judge you in comparison with the best people in your field, in whatever area you just wrote in. There's not a lot of aesthetic sensibility in the physics department at the University of Chicago. In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. 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. No one gets a PhD in biology and ends up doing particle physics. 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?