why was sean carroll denied tenure

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. There was one course I was supposed to take to also get a physics degree. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. I think that the vast majority of benefit that students get from their university education is from interacting with other students. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. Formerly a research professor in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Department of Physics,[1] he is currently an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute,[2] and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He wasn't bothered by the fact that you are not a particle physicist. There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. Here is the promised follow-up to put my tenure denial ordeal, now more than seven years ago, in some deeper context. So, again, I foolishly said yes. It's not just you can do them, so you get the publication, and that individual idea is interesting, but it has to build to something greater than the individual paper itself. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. You get one quarter off from teaching every year. I guess, I was already used to not worrying too much. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. But he does have a very long-lasting interest in magnetic fields. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. Also, I got on a bunch of other shortlists. What about minus 1.1? I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. It was 100% on my radar, and we can give thanks to the New York Times magazine. I took the early universe [class] from Alan. Stephen Morrow is his name. Chicago is a little bit in between. There's a large number of people who are affiliated one way or the other. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. And the postdoc committee at Caltech rejected me. In fact, no one cited it at the time -- people are catching on now -- but it was on the arrow of time in cosmology and why entropy in the universe is smaller in the past than in the future. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. 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. So, it's not just that you have your specialty, but what niche are you going to fill in that faculty that hires you. I absolutely am convinced that one of the biggest problems with modern academic science, especially on the theoretical side, is making it hard for people to change their research direction. Let every student carve out a path of study. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. 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. I really wanted to move that forward. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. Like, okay, this is a lot of money. I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. No one told me. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. Again, I was wrong. Physicists have devised a dozen or two . So, I kind of talked with my friends. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. 4. Well, I have visited, just not since I got the title. Talking about all of the things I don't understand in public intimidates me. I think, they're businesspeople. He is, by any reasonable measure, a very serious physicist. Wilson denied it, calling Pete a father figure and claiming he never wanted them . So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. There is a whole other discussion, another three-hour discussion, about how the attitude among physicists has changed from the first half of the 20th century to now, when physicists were much more broadly interested in philosophy and other issues. 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. 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. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. At the time, . So, that was true in high school. But we don't know yet, and it's absolutely worth trying. I taught graduate particle physics, relativity. And this time, first I had to do it all by myself, but because I was again foolishly ambitious, I typed up all the lecture notes, so equations and everything, before each lecture, Xeroxed them and handed them out. It's funny that you mention law school. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. That was always holding me back that I didn't know quantum field theory at the time. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. But I don't remember what it was. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. I've done it. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. Why did Sean Carroll denied tenure? That's the case I tried to make. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. The South Pole telescope is his baby. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. The first paper I ever wrote and got published with George Field and Roman Jackiw predicted exactly this effect. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. To my slight credit, I realized it, and I jumped on it, and I actually collaborated with Brian and his friends in the high-z supernova team on one of his early papers, on measuring what we now call w, the equation of state parameter. So, the idea of doing observational cosmology was absolutely there, and just obvious at the time. I do think my parents were smart cookies, but again, not in any sense intellectual, or anything like that. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? 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. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. The two groups, Saul Perlmutter's team, and Brian Schmidts and Adam Riess's team, discovered the accelerating universe. I got two postdoc offers, one at Cambridge and one at Santa Barbara. That's why I joined the debate and speech team. This is December 1997. I lucked into it, once again. You do get a seat at the table, in a way, talking about religion that I wouldn't if I were talking about the economy, for example. Everyone sort of nods along and puts up with it and waits for the next equation to come on. That's not data. Late in 2011, CERN had a press conference saying, "We think we've gotten hints that we might discover the Higgs boson." A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. That's a romance, that's not a reality. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. Not especially, no. Carroll recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics as a ten-year-old. They were all graduate students at the time. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. But the idea that there's any connection with what we do as professional scientists and these bigger questions about the nature of reality is just not one that modern physicists have. There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. There's good physics reasons. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. Sometimes I get these little, tiny moments when I can even suggest something to the guest that is useful to them, which makes me tickled a little bit. The slot is usually used for people -- let's say you're a researcher who is really an expert at a certain microwave background satellite, but maybe faculty member is not what you want to do, or not what you're quite qualified to do, but you could be a research professor and be hired and paid for by the grant on that satellite. 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. I will never think that there's any replacement for having a professor at the front of the room, and some students, and they're talking to each other in person, and they can interact, and you know, office hours, and whatever it is. It wasn't even officially an AP class, so I had to take calculus again when I got to college. Thank goodness. [14] He has also published a YouTube video series entitled "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe" which provides physics instruction at a popular-science level but with equations and a mathematical basis, rather than mere analogy. You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." The Planck scale, or whatever, is going to be new physics. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. In fact, the university or the department gets money from the NSF for bringing me on. Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit. That's a recognized thing that's going on. You know when someone wants to ask a question. You can't get a non-tenured job. Honestly, I still think the really good book about the accelerating universe has yet to be written. So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in.