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

So, I think it's a big difference. 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. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. But there's a certain kind of model-building, going beyond the Standard Model, that is a lot of guessing. Thank you for inviting me on. I did not succeed in that goal. She never went to college. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. Planning, not my forte. Michael Nielsen, who is a brilliant guy and a friend of mine, has been trying, not very successfully, but trying to push the idea of open science. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. We've done a few thousand, what else are you going to learn from a few million?" I think I figured it out myself eventually, or again, I got advice and then ignored it and eventually figured it out myself. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. These were all live possibilities. There were hints of it. So, it wasn't until my first year as a postdoc that I would have classified myself in that way. 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. I'm not discounting me. That's a romance, that's not a reality. Carroll teamed up with Steven Novella, a neurologist by profession and known for his skepticism,; the two argued against the motion. We don't know what to do with this." And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." Sean Carroll. So, I was a hot property then, and I was nobody when I applied for my second postdoc. 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. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. But the dream, the goal is that they will realize they should have been focused on it once I write the paper. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." You're really looking out into the universe as a whole. 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? It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. I just think they're wrong. 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. The world has changed a lot. Again, I was wrong over and over again. Also, of course, it's a perfectly legitimate criterion to say, let's pick smart people who will do something interesting even if we don't know what it is. Let's just say that. My biggest contribution early on was to renovate the room we all had lunch in in the particle theory group. Chicago was great because the teaching requirements were quite low compared to other places. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. 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. January 2, 2023 11:30 am. If I had just gone to relativity, they probably would have just kept me. Yeah, again, I'm a big believer in diverse ecosystems. Theorists never get this job. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. I said, "Well, yeah, I did. I really do think that in some sense, the amount that a human being is formed and shaped, as a human being, not as a scientist, is greater when they're an undergraduate than when they're a graduate. . 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. No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. In my mind, there were some books -- like, Bernard Schutz wrote a book, which had this wonderful ambition, and Jim Hartle wrote a book on teaching general relativity to undergraduates. In retrospect, there's two big things. This is probably 2000. His dissertation was entitled Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. 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. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. There's one correct amount of density that makes the geometry of space be flat, like Euclid said back in the prehistory. It was on a quarter system: fall, winter, spring quarters. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. So, he started this big problems -- I might have said big picture, but it's big problems curriculum -- where you would teach to seniors an interdisciplinary course in something or another. That's a huge effect on people's lives. At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. More than just valid. Well, as in many theoretical physics theses, I just stapled together all the papers I had written. So, I want to do something else. There was a rule in the Harvard astronomy department, someone not from Harvard had to be on your committee. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . Don't have "a bad year.". 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. He is a man of above-average stature. The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. You were starting to do that. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. 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. The series has become the basis of a new book series with the installment, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion", published in September 2022.[15]. 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 said, as a general relativist, so I knew how to characterize mathematically, what does it mean for -- what is the common thing between the universe reaching the certain Hubble constant and the acceleration due to gravity reaching a certain threshold? I think the reason why is because they haven't really been forced to sit down and think about quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics, all for its own sake. I'm curious how much of a new venture this was for you, thinking about intellectually serving in academic departments. So, sometimes, you should do what you're passionate about, and it will pay off. Now, the KITP. He asked me -- I was a soft target, obviously -- he asked me to give a talk at the meeting, and my assignment was measuring cosmological parameters with everything except for the cosmic microwave background. Hopefully it'll work out. Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . I'm crystal clear that this other stuff that I do hurts me in terms of being employable elsewhere. I'm finally, finally catching up now to the work that I'm supposed to be doing, rather than choosing to do, to make the pandemic burden a little bit lighter on people. And he says, "Yes, everything the Santa Fe Institute has ever done counts." So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. Mark Hoffman was his name. George didn't know the stuff. The original typescript is available. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. Blogging was a big bubble that almost went away. So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. The thing that people are looking for, the experimental effort these days, and for very good reason, is aimed at things that we think are plausibly true.