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. Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion? In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. People always ask, did science fiction have anything to do with it? I ended up taking six semesters and getting a minor in philosophy. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. Planning, not my forte. Absolutely the same person.". So, basically, there's like a built-in sabbatical. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" So, two things. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. -- super pretentious exposition of how the world holds together in the broadest possible sense. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. We made up lecture notes, and it was great. Most of the reports, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, mentioned that Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics who blogs on Cosmic Variance, also was denied tenure this year. That's what I am. So, when I was at Chicago, I would often take on summer students, like from elsewhere or from Chicago, to do little research projects with. It's actually a very rare title, so even within university departments, people might not understand it. I knew relativity really well, but I still felt, years after school, that I was behind when it came to field theory, string theory, things like that. In retrospect, he should have believed both of them. I haven't given it up yet. Women are often denied tenure for less obvious reasons, according to studies, even in less gender-biased . When we were collaborating, it was me doing my best to keep up with George. One of the reasons why is she mostly does work in ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which is world class, but she wrote some paper about extra dimensions and how they could be related to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. But exactly because the Standard Model and general relativity are so successful, we have exactly the equation -- they're not just good ideas. So, I was done in 20 minutes. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. By reputation only. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. We discovered the -- oh, that was the other cosmology story I wanted to tell. So, what they found, first Adam and Brian announced in February 1998, and then Saul's group a few months later, that the universe is accelerating. I was there. Again, because I underestimated this importance of just hanging out with likeminded people. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. But instead, in my very typical way, I wrote a bunch of papers with a bunch of different people, including a lot of people at MIT. What Is a Tenured Employee? Benefits of Earning This Status People still do it. If you just have a constant, that's the cosmological constant. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. I had the results. In some extent, it didn't. I remember, on the one hand, I did it and I sat down thinking it was really bad and I didn't do very well. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. I wonder, Sean, if there's the germinating idea that would inform your interests in outreach, and in doing public science and things like that, it was that inclination that was bounded in an academic context, that you would take eventually into the world of YouTube, and hundreds of thousands of lay people out there, who are learning quantum gravity as a result of you. I guess, one way of putting it is, you hear of such a thing as an East Coast physics and a West Coast physics. 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. Yeah. So, I got talk to a lot of wonderful people who are not faculty members at different places. You know, students are very different. 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. That's a recognized thing that's going on. I think I got this wrong once. One is, it was completely unclear whether we would ever make any progress in observational cosmology. There's always exceptions to that. There were hints of it. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. Harvard taught a course, but no one liked it. The headline on this post is stupid insofar as neither was "doubting" Darwin. There's a bunch. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. Below is a fairly new and short (7 minute) video by the Official Website Physicist Sean Carroll on free will. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. I was absolutely of the strong feeling that you get a better interview when you're in person. Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. We didn't know, so that paper got a lot of citations later on. And at my post tenure rejection debrief, with the same director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, he said, "Yeah, you know, we really wanted you to write more papers that were highly impactful." Uniquely, in academia the fired professor . So, I did eventually get a postdoc. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. I could point to the papers I wrote with the many, many citations all I wanted to, but that impression was in their minds. Maybe it's them. I should be finishing this paper rather than talking to you, on quantum mechanics and energy conservation. 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. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. When I wrote my first couple papers, just the idea that I could write a paper was amazing to me, and just happy to be there. So, I think, if anything, the obligation that we have is to give back a little bit to the rest of the world that supports us in our duties, in our endeavors, to learn about the universe, and if we can share some piece of knowledge that might changes their lives, let's do that. But the idea is that given the interdisciplinary nature of the institute, they can benefit, and they do benefit from having not just people from different areas, but people from different areas with some sort of official connection to the institute. I'm not discounting me. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. You need to go and hang out with people, especially in the more interdisciplinary fields. They are . It was like cinderblocks, etc., but at least it was spacious. I got on one and then got rejected the year after that because I was not doing what people were interested in. So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. I hope that the whole talk about Chicago will not be about me not getting tenure, but I actually, after not getting tenure, I really thought about it a lot, and I asked for a meeting with the dean and the provost. I love writing books so much. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. Despite the fact that it was hugely surprising, we were all totally ready for it. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism. But the only graduate schools I applied to were in physics because by then I figured out that what I really wanted to do was physics. And we just bubbled over in excitement about general relativity, and our friends in the astronomy department generally didn't take general relativity, which is weird in a sense. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. Euclid's laws work pretty well. With over 1,900 citations, it helped pioneer the study of f(R) gravity in cosmology. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. It was really the blackholes and the quarks that really got me going. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Cornel West Says Harvard Denied Him Tenure Consideration - HuffPost Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? I mean, I could do it. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. Some people love it. I didn't stress about that. So many ideas I want to get on paper. Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." Like, here's the galaxy, weigh it, put it on a scale. I've gotten good at it. I think that is part of it. I'm not going to let them be in the position I was in with not being told what it takes to get a job. I've never cared. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. And that's by choice, because you don't want to talk to them with as much eagerness as you want to talk to other kinds of scientists or scholars. So, that's what he would do. Even though academia has a love for self-scrutiny, we overlook the consequences of tenure denial. Having said that, you bring up one of my other pet crazy ideas, which is I would like there to be universities, at least some, again, maybe not the majority of them, but universities without departments. The University of Chicago Magazine I don't agree with what they do. So, they knew everything that I had done. I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006.
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