The unions were anathema. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. The expansion rate of the universe, even though these two numbers are completely unrelated to each other.
What to do if you're facing tenure denial | Small Pond Science The two that were most interesting to me were the University of Chicago, where I eventually ended up going, and University of Washington in Seattle. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. As it turned out, CERN surprised us by discovering the Higgs boson early. 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. So, I still didn't quite learn that lesson, that you should be building to some greater thing. But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. I will." You're being exposed to new ideas, and very often, you don't even know where those ideas come from. The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. Not to put you on the psychologists couch, but there were no experiences early in life that sparked an interest in you to take this stand as a scientist in your debates on religion. It's not just a platitude. I was hired to do something, and for better or for worse, I do take what I'm hired to do kind of seriously. I'm enough of a particle physicist. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? I'm on a contract. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. It was July 4th. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. We wrote a paper that did the particle physics and quantum field theory of this model, and said, "Is it really okay, or is this cheating? I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? I think so. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian.
A Surprise Point of Agreement With Sean Carroll I got the Packard Fellowship. 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. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. I think one thing I just didn't learn in graduate school, despite all the great advice and examples around me, was the importance of not just doing things because you can do them. So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. Our Browse Subjects feature is also affected by this migration. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. 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. We learned Fortran, the programming language back then. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it.
Sean Carroll on Twitter: "Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. What could I do?
Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure? - Chicago Tribune 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. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. So, that's where I wanted my desk to be so I could hang out with those people. 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? Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. You're old. I forced myself to think about leaving academia entirely. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. The tentative title is The Physics of Democracy, where I will be mixing ideas from statistical physics, and complex systems, and things like that, with political theory and political practice, and social choice theory, and economics, and a whole bunch of things. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. Sean Carroll on free will. I learned general relativity from Nick Warner, which later grew into the book that I wrote. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. It was a very casual procedure. It is January 4th, 2021. And there are others who are interested in not necessarily public outreach, but public policy, or activism, or whatever. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. Not the policy implementations of them, or even -- look, to be perfectly honest, since you're just going to burn these tapes when we're done, so I can just say whatever I want, I'm not even that fired up by outreach. 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. For hiring a postdoc, it does make perfect sense to me -- they're going to be there for a few years, they're going to be doing research. But to shut off everything else I cared about was not worth it to me. I might do that in an academic setting if the opportunity comes along, and I might just go freelance and do that. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. I'm definitely not going to be at Caltech, even two years from now. But that's okay. So, we wrote a paper on that, and it became very popular and highly cited. 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. For every galaxy, the radius is different, but what he noticed was, and this is still a more-or-less true fact that really does demand explanation, and it's a good puzzle. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. I think to first approximation, no. 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. Can I come talk to you for an hour in your lab?" I think people like me should have an easier time. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. Anyway, again, afterward, more than one person says, "Why did you write a textbook? They decide to do physics for a living. How could I modify R so that it acted normal when space time was curved, but when space time became approximately flat, it changed. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. So, basically, I could choose really what I wanted to write for the next book. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society . 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. 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. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. Social media, Instagram. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. I ended up going to MIT, which was just down the river, and working with people who I already knew, and I think that was a mistake. Literally, "We're giving it to you because we think you're good. I will confess the error of my ways. There were so many good people there, and they were really into the kind of quirky things that I really liked. I taught what was called a big picture course. 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. I'm trying to remember -- when I got there, on the senior faculty, there was George, and there was Bill Press, and I'm honestly not sure there was anyone else -- I'm trying to think -- which is just ridiculous for the largest number -- there were a few research professor level people. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. So, they said, "Here's what we'll do.
Sean Carroll on Twitter Hopefully it'll work out. One thing that you want them to cohere with is reality, the evidence of the data, whatever it is. Normal stuff, I would say, but getting money was always like, okay, I hope it'll happen. To his great credit, Eddie Farhi, taught me this particle physics class, and he just noticed that I was asking good questions, and asked me who I was. I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. And in the meantime, Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and others, came up with this idea of phantom energy, which had w less than minus one. Learn new things about the world. A derivative is the slope of something. What were those topics that were occupying your attention? Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. So, most research professors at Caltech are that. And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." That was a glimpse of what could be possible. Having said that, they're still really annoying. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. Faculty are used to disappointment. Again, I was wrong over and over again. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. 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. Tenure denial, seven years later. Sean Carroll is a tenured research physics professor at Caltech with thousands of citations. I didn't do any of that, but I taught them the concept. 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. When I was very young, we were in Levittown, Pennsylvania. We'll publish that, or we'll put that out there." So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. Sean Carroll, a nontenure track research professor at Caltechand science writerwrote a widely read blog post, facetiously entitled "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University," drawing partially from his own previous failed tenure attempt at the University of Chicago (Carroll, 2011). To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in. Again, I had great people at MIT. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. In other words, you're decidedly not in the camp of somebody like a Harold Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, where you are pessimistic that we as a society, in sum, are not getting dumber, that we are not becoming more closed-minded. 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. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that.