This is a weird list. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. To do that, I have to do a certain kind of physics with them, and a certain kind of research in order to help them launch their careers. 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." Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. And the most direct way to do that is to say, "Look, you should be a naturalist. I'm on a contract. I think I got this wrong once. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. He was trying to learn more about the early universe. 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. Is there something wrong about it?" In fact, I would argue, as I sort of argued a little bit before, that as successful as the model of specialization and disciplinary attachment has been, and it should continue to be the dominant model, it should be 80%, not 95% of what we do. And I knew that. And he said, "Absolutely. Moving on after tenure denial. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. It's challenging. The statement added, "This failure is especially . 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. 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. There were people who absolutely had thought about it. So, coming up with a version of it that wasn't ruled out was really hard, and we worked incredibly hard on it. So, I went to a large public school. When you're falling asleep, when you're taking a shower, when you're feeding the cat, you're really thinking about physics. She never went to college. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. Well, I just did the dumbest thing. [53][third-party source needed]. And Chicago was somewhere in between. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. Oh, kinds of physics. Bill was the only one who was a little bit of a strategist in terms of academia. I guess, the final thing is that the teaching at that time in the physics department at Harvard, not the best in the world. One of my good friends is Don Page at the University of Alberta, who is a very top-flight theoretical cosmologist, and a born-again Evangelical Christian. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. In fact, I'd go into details, but I think it would have been easier for me if I had tenure than if I'm a research professor. Those are all very important things and I'm not going to write them myself. That's just the system. You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. That's when I have the most fun. Spread the word. You know, every one [of them] is different, like every child -- they all have their own stories and their own personalities. 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. Sean, before we begin developing the life narrative, your career and personal background trajectory, I want to ask a very presentist question. I don't have to go to the class, I don't have to listen to you, I'll sign the piece of paper." What I wanted to do was to let them know how maybe they could improve the procedure going forward. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. Completely blindsided. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. So, we wrote one paper with my first graduate student at Chicago -- this is kind of a funny story that illustrates how physics gets done. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. Either you bit the bullet and you did that, or you didnt. We've already established that. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. I laugh because I'm friends -- Jennifer, my wife, is a science journalist -- so we're friends with a lot of science journalists. They were all graduate students at the time. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. Please contact [emailprotected] with any feedback. In a podcast in 2018, Sam Harris engaged with Carroll. I'm also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where I've just been for a couple of years. Happy to be breathing the air. "I don't think that is necessarily my situation."Sean Carroll, a physicist, is another University of Chicago blogger who was denied tenure, back in May. 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 article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. These are all very, very hard questions. I had the best thesis committee ever. You can come here, and it'll be a trial run to see if you fit in, and where you fit in the best." But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. Go longer. He had to learn it. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. Sean, one of the more prosaic aspects of tenure is, of course, financial stability. That is, he accept "physical determinism" as totally underlying our behavior (he . In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. I really leaned into that. 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?" It helped really impress upon me the need for departments to be proactive in taking care of their students. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with . So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. Maybe it was that the universe was open, that the omega matter was just .3. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. There's a bunch. I lucked into it, once again. No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet. 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. 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. Steve Weinberg tells me something very different from Michael Turner, who tells me something very different from Paul Steinhardt, who tells me something very different from Alan Guth. But I'll still be writing physics papers and philosophy papers, hopefully doing real research in more interdisciplinary areas as well, from whatever perch. I've already stopped taking graduate students, because I knew this was the plan for a while. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. That's a recognized thing that's going on. So, temporarily, this puts me in a position where I'm writing papers and answering questions that no one cares about, because I'm trying to build up a foundation for going from the fundamental quantumness of the universe to the classical world we see. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. 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, I think economically, during the time my mom had remarried, we were middle class. And my response to them is what we do, those of us who are interested in the deepest questions about the nature of reality, whether they're physicists, or philosophers, or whoever, like I said before, we're not going to cure cancer. But look, all these examples are examples where there's a theoretical explanation ready to hand. However, you can also be denied tenure if you hav. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? I don't want to be snobbish but being at one of the world's great intellectual centers was important to me, because you want to bump into people in the hallways who really lift you to places you wouldn't otherwise have gone. Had I made a wrong choice by going into academia? At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. This is not what you predict in conventional physics, but it's like my baby. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. So, I did, and they became very popular. We were expecting it to be in November, and my book would have been out. Sep 2010 - Jul 20165 years 11 months. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. This is December 1997. Who hasn't written one, really? There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. It was clearly for her benefit that we were going. It was very small. Sean Carroll: I'm not in a super firm position, cause I don't have tenure at Caltech, so, but I don't care either. Like, ugh. You got a full scholarship there, of course. It was a very casual procedure. I'm very, very collaborative in the kind of science that I do, so that's hard, but also just getting out and seeing your friends and going to the movies has been hard. But, okay, not everyone is going to read your book. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. [38] Carroll received an "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation Annual National Convention in October 2014. What you hear, the honest opinion you get is not from the people who voted against you on your own faculty, but before I got the news, there were people at other universities who were interested in hiring me away. So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. Or, maybe I visited there, but just sort of unofficially. 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. 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. This happens quite often. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." The South Pole telescope is his baby. A stylistic clash, I imagine. Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. Grant applications and papers get turned down, and . That's absolutely true. I thought and think -- I think it's true that they and I had a similar picture of who I would be namely bringing those groups together, serving as a bridge between all those groups. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. I don't think so. I got books -- I liked reading. I'm not an expert in that, honestly. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We'd be having a very different conversation if you did. Some people say that's bad, and people don't want that. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. Six months is a very short period of time. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. People think they've heard too much about dark energy, and honestly, your proposal sounds a little workmanlike. So, I do think that my education as a physicist has been useful in my caring about other fields in a way that other choices would not have been. Had it been five years ago, that would have been awesome, but now there's a lot of competition. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. I think it's more that people don't care. So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. 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?" And, also, I think it's a reflection of the status of the field right now, that we're not being surprised by new experimental results every day. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. So, I said, "Yes, I proposed a book and your wife rejected it.". I think it's fine to do different things, work in different areas, learn different things. So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want .
