why was sean carroll denied tenuredewalt dcr025 fuse location

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. 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. In that era, it's kind of hard to remember. So, I intentionally tried to drive home the fact that universities, as I put it, hired on promise and fired on fear. . Once I didn't get tenure, I didn't want to be there anymore. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. Carroll explains how his wide-ranging interests informed his thesis research, and he describes his postgraduate work at MIT and UC Santa Barbara. They are clearly different in some sense. 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. Let's sit and think about this seriously." Either then, or retrospectively, do you see any through lines that connected all of these different papers in terms of the broader questions you were most interested in? Carroll, while raised as an Episcopalian,[36] is an atheist, or as he calls it, a "poetic naturalist". That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. / Miscellany. 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. I pretend that they're separate. To be denied tenure for reasons that were fabricated or based on misunderstandings I cleared up prior to tenure discussion. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. Naval Academy, and she believes the reason is bias. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. With Villanova, it's clear enough it's close to home. The much bigger thing was, Did you know quantum field theory? And I was amused to find that he had trouble getting a job, George Gamow. Again, I could generate the initiative to do that, but it's not natural, whereas in Chicago, it kind of did all blend into each other in a nice way. Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. So, they have no trouble keeping up with me, and I do feel bad about that sometimes. There were two that were especially good. So, my three years at Santa Barbara, every single year, I thought I'll just get a faculty job this year, and my employability plummeted. Sean Carroll: I mean, it's a very good point and obviously consciousness is the one place where there's plenty of very, very smart people who decline to go all the way to being pure physicalists for various reasons, various arguments, David Chalmers' hard problem, the zombie argument. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. Literally, my math teacher let me teach a little ten minute thing on how to -- sorry, not math teacher. And I applied there to graduate school and to postdocs, and every single time, I got accepted. Like you said, it's pencil and paper, and I could do it, and in fact, rather than having a career year in terms of getting publications done, it was a relatively slow year. I think I'm pretty comfortable with that idea. Just get to know people. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. 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. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. 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 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. They're not exactly the same activity, but they're part of the same landscape. So, that was true in high school. I don't want to say anything against them. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. There's always exceptions to that. It doesn't need to be confined to a region. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. I was like, I can't do that, but it's very impressive, but okay. So, and it's good to be positive about the great things about science and academia and so forth, but then you can be blindsided. Not to mention, socialization. Right. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. I really leaned into that. The modern world, academically, broadly, but also science in particular, physics in particular, is very, very specialized. It's the time that I would spend, if I were a regular faculty member, on teaching, which is a huge amount of time. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True But even without that, it was still the most natural value to have. I also started a new course, general relativity for undergraduates, which had not been taught before, and they loved it. I lucked into it, once again. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. I want it to be proposing new ideas, not just explaining ideas out there. Sean Carroll - Chief Procurement Officer - NYS Office of General It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. So, I played around writing down theories, and I asked myself, what is the theory for gravity? So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. That was my talk. One of my best graduate students, Grant Remmen, is deeply religious. That was clear, and there weren't that many theorists at Harvard, honestly. Like, ugh. 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, the Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes means you and I and the tables and chairs around us, the lights behind you, the computers we're talking on, supervene on a particular theory of the world at one level, at the quantum field theory level. The U of Chicago denied his tenure years ago, and that makes him damaged goods in the academic world. We'll measure it." What Is Time? | Professor Sean Carroll Explains Presentism and Again, I did badly at things that I now know are very obvious things to do. Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. I don't recommend anyone listening that you choose your life's path when you're ten years old, because what do you know? 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. I do try my best to be objective. Like, literally, right now, I'm interested in why we live in position space, not in momentum space. Being surrounded by the best people was really, really important to me. I presented good reasons why w could not be less than minus one, but how good are they? And I knew that. Parenthetically, a couple years later, they discovered duality, and field theory, and string theory, and that field came to life, and I wasn't working on that either, if you get the theme here. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. There's a moral issue there that if you're not interested in that, that's a disservice to the graduate students. So, I want to do something else. The actual question you ask is a hard one because I'm not sure. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. That's it. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. That's just the system. The original typescript is available. Carroll claimed that quantum eternity theorem (QET) was better than BGV theorem. What were the most interesting topics at that time? Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. Then, when my grandmother, my mother's mother, passed away when I was about ten, we stopped going. To be perfectly fair, there are plenty of examples of people who have either gotten tenure, or just gotten older, and their research productivity has gone away. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. So, they had clearly not talked to each other. They were very bad at first. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX, American Association of Physicists in Medicine, AVS: Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing. It's remarkable how trendiness can infect science. My parents got divorced very early, when I was six. in Astronomy, Astrophysics and philosophy from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. Let's put it that way. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . I've said this before, but I want to live in the world where people work very hard 9 to 5 jobs, go to the pub for a drink, and talk about what their favorite dark matter particle candidate is, or what their favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics is. It was my first exposure to the idea that you could not only be atheist but be happy with it. Who did you work with? "What major research universities care about is research. Yeah, I think that's right. 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. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. I went to Santa Barbara, the ITP, as it was then known. Except, because my name begins with a C, if they had done that for the paper, I was a coauthor on, I would have been the second author. He was a very senior guy. You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. Absolutely. I mean, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe video series is the exception to this, because there I'm really talking about well-established things. So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. The South Pole telescope is his baby. It's challenging. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, teaching in both the . You can make progress digging deeply into some specialized subfield. 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 . Since I've been ten years old, how about that? But maybe it's not, and I don't care. When I did move to Caltech circa 2006, and I did this conscious reflection on what I wanted to do for a living, writing popular books was one of the things that I wanted to do, and I had not done it to that point. Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. I explained it, and one of my fellow postdocs, afterwards, came up to me and said, "That was really impressive." I just disagree with where they're coming from, so I don't want to be supported by them, because I think that I would be lending my credibility to their efforts, which I don't agree with, and that becomes a little bit muddled. Are there any advantages through a classical education in astronomy that have been advantageous for your career in cosmology? Onondaga County. It was very funny, because in astronomy, who's first author matters. 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. No one told me. Big name, respectable name in the field, but at the time, being assistant professor at Harvard was just like being a red shirt on Star Trek, right? I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? And I answered it. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. 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. So, all of those things. You know when someone wants to ask a question. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. 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. That doesn't work. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. 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. Ted Pyne and I wrote a couple papers, one on the microwave background. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. But within the course of a week -- coincidence problem -- Vikram Duvvuri, who was a graduate student in Chicago, knocked on my door, and said, "Has anyone ever thought of taking R and adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity and seeing what would happen?" They saw the writing on the wall. 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. I've written down a lot of Lagrangians in my time to try to guess. There's a strong theory group at Los Alamos, for example. I asked him, "In graduate school, the Sean Carroll that we know today, is that the same person?" No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. I want the podcast to be enjoyable to people who don't care about theoretical physics. 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. College Park, MD 20740 So, he founded that. There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. 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. It's a messy thing. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. So, you can see me on the one hand, as the videos go on, the image gets better and sharper, and the sound gets better. 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. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. Basically Jon Rosner, who's a very senior person, was the only theorist who was a particle physicist, which is just weird. So, I recognize that. So, it's not quite true, but in some sense, my book is Wald for the common person. And that gives you another handle on the total matter density. There's a different set of things than you believe, propositions about the world, and you want them to sort of cohere. Cornel West Says Harvard Denied Him Tenure Consideration - HuffPost These are all very, very hard questions. What is at stake with Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure Graduate school is a different thing. So, I suspect that they are here to stay. Benefits of tenure. You don't really need to do much for those. 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. My favorite teachers were English teachers, to be honest. So, that's how I started working with Alan. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. 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. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that.

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