I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. There are theorists who are sort of very closely connected to the experiments. No, I think I'm much more purposive about choosing what to work on now than I was back then. Redirecting to /article/national-blogging-prof-fails-to-heed-his-own-advice (308) That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. But I get plenty of people listening, and that makes me very pleased. I was really surprised." There are, of course, counterexamples, or examples, whichever way you want to put it. Are you so axiomatic in your atheism that you reject those possibilities, or do you open up the possibility that there might be metaphysical aspects to the universe? Depending on the qualities they are looking for, tenure may determine if they consider hiring the candidate. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. I can do it, and it is fun. I don't know whether this is -- there's only data point there, but the Higgs boson was the book people thought they wanted, and they liked it. That was always temporary. There was no internet back then. Or are you comfortable with that idea, as so many other physicists who reinvent themselves over the course of a career are? No, and to be super-duper honest here, I can't possibly be objective, because I didn't get tenure at the University of Chicago. I'm not sure how much time passed. So, Mark Trodden and I teamed up with a graduate student, my first graduate student at Chicago. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. Because they pay for your tuition. Everyone got to do research from their first year in college. I love the little books like Quantum Physics for Babies, or Philosophy for Dummies. Let's do the thing that will help you reach those goals. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. Princeton University Press. But I did learn something. Tenure denial, seven years later | Small Pond Science Now, next year, I'll get a job. So, the density goes down as the volume goes up, as space expands. Sean, thank you so much for spending this time with me. But when I started out on the speech and debate team, they literally -- every single time I would give a talk, I would get the same comments. They met every six months while you were a graduate student, after you had passed your second-year exam. That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. Also, my individual trajectory is very crooked and unusual in its own right. Another paper, another paper, another paper. Not for everybody, and again, I'm a huge believer in the big ecosystem. Some people are just crackpots. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. But they did know that I wrote a textbook in general relativity, a graduate-level textbook. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. Honestly, I'm not sure Caltech quite knew what to do with it. So, I recognize that. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. Whereas, for a faculty hire, it's completely the opposite. Sean Carroll, a physicist, was denied tenure by his department this year. [53][third-party source needed]. What you should do is, if you're a new faculty member in a department, within the first month of being there, you should have had coffee or lunch with every faculty member. I had done that for a while, and I have a short attention span, and I moved on. I think that's one of the reasons why we hit it off. There's a bunch. All while I was in Santa Barbara. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. This goes way back, when I was in Villanova was where I was introduced to philosophy, and discovered it, because they force you to take it. 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. Roughly speaking, my mom and my stepfather told me, "We have zero money to pay for you to go to college." So, I wrote up a little proposal, and I sent it to Katinka Matson, who is an agent with the Brockman Group, and she said something which I think is true, now that I know the business a lot better, which was, "It's true maybe it's not the perfect book, but people have a vague idea that there has been the perfect book. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. So, if I can do that, I can branch out afterwards. 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. Sean, when you got to MIT, intellectually, or even administratively, was this just -- I mean, I'm hearing such a tale of exuberance as a graduate. We might have met at a cosmology conference. That was great, a great experience. I got to reveal that we had discovered the anisotropies in the microwave background. I'd like to start first with your parents. In 2017, Carroll took part in a discussion with B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar and monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. You're just too old for that. As long as they were thinking about something, and writing some equations, and writing papers, and discovering new, cool things about the universe, they were happy. But clearly it is interesting since everyone -- yeah. We had a wonderful teacher, Ed Kelly, who had coached national championship debate teams before. Should we let w be less than minus one?" Let's just take the risk, and if they don't work out they won't get tenure." The tenure decision is very different than the hiring decision. I was never repulsed by the church, nor attracted to it in any way. There are property dualists, who are closer to ordinary naturalist physicists. [3][4] He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist. Young universities ditch the tenure system. Tenured employment provides many benefits to both the employee and the organization. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. I'm not sure privileged is the word, but you do get a foot in the door. When I got to Chicago as a new faculty member, what sometimes happens is that if you're at a big name place like Chicago, people who are editors at publishing houses for trade books will literally walk down the halls and knock on doors and say, "Hey, do you want to write a book? Like I said, the reason we're stuck is because our theories are so good. We're pushing it forward, hopefully in interesting ways, and predicting the future is really hard. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. Hundreds of thousands of views for each of the videos. What to do if you're facing tenure denial | Small Pond Science Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. So, just for me, they made up a special system where first author, alphabetical, and then me at the end. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. That's a huge effect on people's lives. George Rybicki was there, and a couple other people. But it was kind of overwhelming. But it did finally dawn on me that I was still writing quirky things about topological defects, and magnetic fields, and different weird things about dark matter, or inflation, or whatever. Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True More than just valid. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. The things I write -- even the video series I did, in fact, especially the video series I did, I made a somewhat conscious decision to target it in between popular level physics and textbook level physics. The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. And he was intrigued by that, and he went back to his editors. That's okay. Sean Carroll's new book argues quantum physics leads to many worlds So, it's one thing if you're Hubble in the 1920s, you can find the universe is expanding. So, I kind of talked with my friends. If I can earn a living doing this, that's what I want to do. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. 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. Alright, Sean. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? Learn new things about the world. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. It makes perfect sense that most people are specialists within academia. Ads that you buy on a podcast really do get return. Ten of those men and no women were successful. This is a very interesting fact to learn that completely surprised me. But there definitely has been a shift. Structurally, do you think, looking back, that you were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, because as idealistic as it sounds to bring people together, intellectually, administratively, you're fighting a very strong tide.