why was sean carroll denied tenure

Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. We might have met at a cosmology conference. I'm not sure of what I'm being asked for. It's not just trendiness. If you're positively curved, you become more and more positively curved, and eventually you re-collapse. There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. The other is this argument absolutely does not rule out the existence of non-physical stuff. I'm not sure how much time passed. (2020) A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.Princeton University Press. Of course, once you get rejected for tenure, those same people lose interest in you. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. So, it would look like I was important, but clearly, I wasn't that important compared to the real observers. I'll go there and it'll be like a mini faculty member. The world has changed a lot. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? So, most research professors at Caltech are that. This is an example of it. To go back to the question of exuberance and navet and not really caring about what other people are thinking, to what extent did you have strong opinions one way or another about the culture of promoting from within at Chicago? [18][19], In 2010, Carroll was elected fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to a wide variety of subjects in cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory, especially ideas for cosmic acceleration, as well as contributions to undergraduate, graduate and public science education". But it was kind of overwhelming. They assert that the universe is "statistically time-symmetric", insofar as it contains equal progressions of time "both forward and backward". I did not succeed in that goal. I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. 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. At Harvard, it's the opposite. Another follow up paper, which we cleverly titled, Could you be tricked into thinking that w is less than minus one? by modifying gravity, or whatever. Carroll is the author of Spacetime And Geometry, a graduate-level textbook in general relativity, and has also recorded lectures for The Great Courses on cosmology, the physics of time and the Higgs boson. 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. These are all things people instantly can latch onto because they're connected to data, the microwave background, and I always think that's important. I'm a big believer that there's no right way to be a physicist. Maybe it's them. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? So, here's another funny story. What about minus 1.1? Well, or I just didn't care. You can challenge them if that seems right. Abdoulaye Doucoure came close to leaving Everton under Frank Lampard tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. Right. Even if you're not completely dogmatic -- even if you think they're likely true but you're not sure, you filter in what information you think is relevant and important, what you discount, both in terms of information, but also in terms of perspective theories. I really wanted to move that forward. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. We talked about discovering the Higgs boson. 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. 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. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? Evolutionary biology also gives you that. It is interesting stuff, but it's not the most interesting stuff. So, we talked about different possibilities. This is a non-tenured position. Was that the case at Chicago, or was that not the case at Chicago? It just came out of the blue. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. Nick is also a friend of mine, and he's a professor at USC now. I think it's gone by now. It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. They just don't care. It was fine. There's still fundamental questions. I took all the courses, and I had one very good friend, Ted Pine, who was also in the astronomy department, and also interested in all the same things I was. Jim was very interdisciplinary in that sense, so he liked me. So, I did start slowly and gradually to expand my research interests, especially because around 2004, so soon before I left Chicago, I wrote what to me was the best paper I wrote at Chicago. They promote the idea of being a specialist, and they just don't know what to do with the idea that you might not be a specialist. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. 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. She's like, okay, this omega that you're measuring, the ratio of the matter density in the universe to the critical density, which you want to be one, here it is going up. But, you know, the contingencies of history. I had no interest. But they told me, they said, "We talked to the people at Chicago, and they thought that you were just interested in writing textbooks and not doing research anymore." That's a very hard question. I think that's the right way to put it. So, it was a very -- it was a big book. No preparation needed from me. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. I have graduate students, I can teach courses when I want to, I apply for grants, I write papers. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. The book talks about wide range of topics such as submicroscopic components of the universe, whether human existence can have meaning without Godand everything between the two. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. I didn't really want to live there. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. I don't want to do that anymore, even if it does get my graduate students jobs. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! So, even though the specialists should always be the majority, we non-specialists need to make an effort to push back to be included more than we are. I remember having a talk with Howard Georgi, and he didn't believe either the solar neutrino problem, or Big Bang nucleosynthesis. 1 Physics Ellipse . That's my question. Again, going back to the research I was doing, in this case, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and a sales pitch for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the most recent research I've been doing on deriving how space time can emerge from quantum mechanics. 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. I was kind of forced into it by circumstances. Certainly nothing academic in his background, but then he sort of left the picture, and my mom raised me. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. We should move into that era." You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." 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." Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. This philosophical question is vitally important to the debate over the causal premiss. So, you have to be hired as a senior person, as a person with tenure in a regular faculty position. I can pinpoint the moment when I was writing a paper with a graduate student on a new model for dark matter that I had come up with the idea, and they worked it out. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. So, it'd be a first author, and then alphabetical. Do you have any good plans for a book?" 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. 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 got books -- I liked reading. 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. I just think they're wrong. That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. Abdoulaye Doucoure has revealed how he came 'close to leaving Everton ' during Frank Lampard 's tenure at the club. So, that's when The Big Picture came along, which was sort of my slightly pretentious -- entirely pretentious, what am I saying? They don't frame it in exactly those terms, but when I email David Krakauer, president of SFI, and said, "I'm starting this book project. Unlike oral histories, for the podcast, the audio quality, noise level, things like that, are hugely important. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. So, they said, "Here's what we'll do. But he was very clear. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. 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. I'm not sure. I was taking Fortran. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution.