Okay. I chose wrongly again. I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. 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. 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 I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. So, if, five or ten years from now, the sort of things that excite me do not include cutting edge theoretical physics, then so be it. Certainly, my sound quality has been improving. So, was that your sense, that you had that opportunity to do graduate school all over again? So, no imaginable scenario, like you said before, your career track has zigged and zagged in all kinds of unexpected ways, but there's probably no scenario where you would have pursued an academic career where you were doing really important, really good, really fundamental work, but work that was generally not known to 99.99% of the population out there. Evolutionary biology also gives you that. No, not really. Alright, Sean. In fact, the short shield solution, the solution that you get in general relativity for spherically symmetric matter distribution, is exactly the same in this new theory as it was in general relativity. It doesn't really explain away dark matter, but maybe it could make the universe accelerate." So, if you've given them any excuse to think that you will do things other than top-flight research by their lights, they're afraid to keep you on. So, I read all the latest papers in many different areas, and I actually learned something. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. What that means is, as the universe expands, the density of energy in every cubic centimeter is going up. CalTech could and should have converted this to a tenured position for someone like Sean Carroll . At the time, he had a blog called Preposterous Universe and he is currently one of five scientists (three of them tenured) who post on the blog Cosmic Variance.Oct 11, 2005. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. I do this over and over again. So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. You really, really need scientists or scholars who care enough about academia to help organize it, and help it work, and start centers and institutes, and blaze new trails for departments. Actually, this is completely unrelated but let me say something else before I forget, because it's in the general area of high school and classes and things like that. So, that's why I said I didn't want to write it. Let every faculty member carve out a disciplinary niche in whatever way they felt was best at the time. Or, I could say, "Screw it." If I were really dealing with the nitty gritty of baryon acoustic oscillations or learning about the black hole mass spectrum from LIGO, then I would care a lot more about the individual technological implications, but my interests don't yet quite bump up against any new discoveries right now. Harold Bloom is a literary critic and other things.
Sean Carroll's advice on How to get tunure | Physics Forums And I'd have to say, "Yes, but maybe the audience does not know what a black hole is, so you need to explain it to us." And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. Give them plenty of room to play with it and learn it, but I think the math is teachable to undergraduates. 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. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. This is an example of it. As the advisor, you can't force them into the mold you want them to be in.
What happens if tenure is denied? - Tracks-movie.com Besides consulting, Carroll worked as a voice actor in Earth to Echo. Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty . No, no, I kind of like it here. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. You're looking under the lamppost. Ed is a cosmologist, and remember, this is the early to mid '90s. These are all very, very hard questions. And I knew that. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. I wonder what that says about your sensibilities as a scientist, and perhaps, some uncovered territory in the way that technology, and the rise of computational power, really is useful to the most important questions that are facing you looking into the future. So, when Brian, Adam, Saul, and their friends announced in 1998 that there was a cosmological constant, everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay. Sean, just a second, the sun is setting here on the east coast. The obvious choices were -- the theoretical cosmology effort was mostly split between Fermilab and the astronomy department at Chicago, less so in the physics department. The title was, if I'm remembering it correctly, Cosmological Consequences of Topological and Geometric Phenomena in Field Theories.
Interview with a Physicist: Sean Carroll | Physics Forums Physicists have devised a dozen or two . Now, the KITP. But apparently there are a few of our faculty who don't think much of my research. So if such an era exists, it is the beginning of the universe. Believe me, the paperback had a sticker on the front saying New York Times best seller. There were some hints, and I could even give you another autobiographical anecdote. The actual job requirements -- a big part of it, the part that I take most seriously, and care most about -- is advising graduate students. Everyone knows about that. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. We are committed to the preservation of physics for future generations, the success of physics students both in the classroom and professionally, and the promotion of a more scientifically literate society. I think it's bad in the following way. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? Young people. They reach very different audiences, and they have very different impacts. So, we made a bet. That's a great place to end, because we're leaving it on a cliffhanger. Or, maybe I visited there, but just sort of unofficially. Well, it's true. In part, that is just because of my sort of fundamentalist, big picture, philosophical inclinations that I want to get past the details of the particular experiment to the fundamental underlying lessons that we learned from them. One is you do get a halfway evaluation. I've been interviewing scientists for almost twenty years now, and in our world, in the world of oral history, we experienced something of an existential crisis last February and March, because for us it was so deeply engrained that doing oral history meant getting in a car, getting on a plane with your video/audio recording equipment, and going to do it in person. They don't quite seem in direct conflict with experiment. [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. But that narrowed down my options quite a bit. I say, "Look, there are things you are interested in. I had an astronomy degree, and I'd hung out with cosmologists, so I knew the buzzwords and everything, but I hadn't read the latest papers. Then, when I got to MIT, they knew that I had taught general relativity, so my last semester as a postdoc, after I had already applied for my next job, so I didn't need to fret about that, the MIT course was going to be taught by a professor who had gone on sabbatical and never returned. I got the Packard Fellowship. The tuition was right. I just want to say. Neta Bahcall, in particular, made a plot that turned over. There's no delay on the line. So, it's really the ideas that have always driven me, and frankly, the pandemic is an annoyance that it got in the way rather than nudging me in that direction. Well, how would you know? I haven't given it up yet. That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. George didn't know the stuff. They do not teach either. I thought that given what I knew and what I was an expert in, the obvious thing to write a popular book about would be the accelerating universe. In particular, the physics department at Harvard had not been converted to the idea that cosmology was interesting. So, there were these plots that people made of, as you look at larger and larger objects, the implied amount of matter density in the universe comes closer and closer to the critical density. They're trying to understand not how science works but what the laws of nature are. Also, with the graduate students, it's not as bad as Caltech, but Chicago is also not as user friendly for the students as Harvard astronomy was. I think I misattributed it to Yogi Berra. And I have been, and it's been incredibly helpful in various ways.
Sean Carroll on free will - Why Evolution Is True Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. It's my personal choice. I looked at the list and I said, "Well, honestly, the one thing I would like is for my desk to be made out of wood rather than metal. They had these cheap metal desks. The Caltech job is unique for various reasons, but that's always hard, and it should be hard. Having all these interests is a wonderful thing, but it's not necessarily most efficacious for pursuing a traditional academic track. So, I wonder, just in the way that atheists criticize religious people for confirmation bias, in this world that you reside in with your academic contemporaries and fellow philosophers and scientists, what confirmation biases have you seen in this world that you feel are holding back the broader endeavor of getting at the truth? Why is that? Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? I took some philosophy of science classes, but they were less interesting to me, because they were all about the process of science. I think all three of those things are valid and important. We won't go there, but the point is, I was friends with all of them. Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade for Payton's rights after his Saints exit last year, according to The Athletic. Sean stands at a height of 5 ft 11 in ( Approx 1.8m). She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. You do travel a lot as a scientist, and you give talks and things like that, go to conferences, interact with people. Firing on all cylinders intellectually. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. Then, Villanova was one of the few places that had merit scholarships. At Los Alamos, yes. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. Like, here's how you should think about the nature of reality and whether or not God exists." Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. The reason is -- I love Caltech. Bill Wimsatt, who is a philosopher at Chicago had this wonderful idea, because Chicago, in many ways, is the MIT of the humanities. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. So, I audited way more classes, and in particular, math classes. Now, was this a unique position that Caltech tailored for you, given what you wanted to do in this next role? I don't know how public knowledge this is. There's a whole set of hot topics that are very, very interesting and respectable, and I'm in favor of them. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. It was very long. So, I could completely convince myself that, in fact -- and this is actually more true now than it maybe was twenty years ago for my own research -- that I benefit intellectually in my research from talking to a lot of different people and doing a lot of different kinds of things. But apparently it was Niels Bohr who said it, and I should get that one right. 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. I think new faculty should get wooden desks.
Why did Sean Carroll not get tenure? - Steadyprintshop.com I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I can tell you a story. I was in Sidney's office all the time. We should move into that era." Sorry, I forgot the specific question I'm supposed to be answering here. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." And he said, "Absolutely. So, I actually worked it out, and then I got the answers in my head, and I gave it to the summer student, and she worked it out and got the same answers.
Does Sean Carroll have tenure? - scientific-know-how.com