why was sean carroll denied tenure

And I didn't. No one who wants to be in favor of pan-psychism or ghosts or whatever that tells me where exactly the equation needs to be modified. We all knew that eventually we'd discover CMB anisotropies if you go back even farther than that. 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 get that all the time. Melville, NY 11747 Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. There are a lot of biologists who have been fighting in the trenches against creationism for a long time. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. Disclaimer: This transcript was scanned from a typescript, introducing occasional spelling errors. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. But it was a great experience for me, too, teaching a humanities course for the first time. [8][9][10] In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. I'm trying to develop new ideas and understand them. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. And I didn't. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." I had that year that I was spending doing other things, and then I returned to doing other things. Certainly, no one academic in my family. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. Theoretical cosmology was the reason I was hired. I just don't want to do that anymore. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. Now, there are a couple things to add to that. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. Now, the academic titles. 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. I have group meetings with them, and we write papers together, and I take that very seriously. Would that be on that level? 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. The one exception -- it took me a long time, because I'm very, very slow to catch on to things. Every cubic centimeter has the same amount of energy in it. We're creeping up on it. I will confess the error of my ways. Martin White. 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. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. Oh, kinds of physics. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. These were people who were at my level. We don't care what you do with it." Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. All of which is to say, once I got to Caltech, I did start working in broadening myself, but it was slow, and it wasn't my job. So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. He describes the fundamental importance of the discovery of the accelerating universe, and the circumstances of his hire at the University of Chicago. As I look from a galaxy to a cluster to large-scale structure, it goes up, and it goes up to .3, and it kind of stays at .3, even as I look at larger and larger things. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. So, for better or worse, this caused me to do a lot more conventional research than I might otherwise have done. Right. My thesis committee was George Field, Bill Press, who I wrote a long review article on the cosmological constant with. He invited a few of us. There are very few ways in which what we do directly affects people's lives, except we can tell them that God doesn't exist. I do a lot of outreach, but if you look closely at what I do, it's all trying to generate new ideas and make arguments. When there are scores of principals leaving, positions staying open for years and talented new hires being denied tenure, it is a sign of a power vacuum (or disinterest) at the top. Carroll has also worked on the arrow of time problem. I've seen almost nothing in physics like that, and I think I would be scared to do that. That was what led to From Eternity to Here, which was my first published book. Again, I was wrong. I think that's much more the reason why you don't hear these discussions that much. 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. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." If someone says, "Oh, I saw a fuzzy spot in the sky. Graduate departments of physics or astronomy or whatever are actually much more similar to each other than undergraduate departments are, because they bring people from all these undergraduate departments. Caltech has this weird system where they don't really look for slots. It's a research institute in Santa Fe that is devoted to the study of complexity in all its forms. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. Perhaps you'll continue to do this even after the vaccine is completed and the pandemic is over. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful. I'm likely to discount that because of all various other prior beliefs whereas someone else might give it a lot of credence. Again, I convinced myself that it wouldn't matter that much. Now that you're sort of on the outside of that, it's almost like you're back in graduate school, where you can just do the most fun things that come your way. It's true, but I did have to take astronomy classes. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. And Sidney Coleman, bless his, answered all the questions. They decide to do physics for a living. It's a great question, because I do get emails from people who read one of my books, or whatever, and then go into physics. 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. Do you go to the economics department or the history department? And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. It's not a matter of credentials, but hopefully being a physicist gives me insight into other areas that I can take seriously those areas in their own rights, learn about them, and move in those directions deliberatively. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. 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. 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. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. Also in 2014, Carroll partook in a debate held by Intelligence Squared, the title of the debate was "Death is Not Final". There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. But they're going to give me money, and who cares? There's extra-mental stuff, pan-psychism, etc. It's not what I want to do. Sidney Coleman, who I mentioned, whose office I was in all the time. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. 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. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. We get pretty heavily intellectual there sometimes, but it warms my heart that so many people care about that stuff. They were very bad at first. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. But there were postdocs. The astronomy department was great, the physics department was great. We had problem sets that we graded. When I was at Harvard, Ted Pyne, who I already mentioned as a fellow graduate student, and still a good friend of mine, he and I sort of stuck together as the two theoretical physicists in the astronomy department. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways. It's hard for me to imagine that I would do that. I can never decide if that's just a stand-in for Berkeley and Princeton, or it means something more general than that. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. Some of them are very narrowly focused, and they're fine. He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. 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. I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. I don't know how public knowledge this is. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. As a Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Sean Carroll's work focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology.

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