why was sean carroll denied tenuremarc bernier funeral arrangements

We've only noticed them through their gravitational impact. There's also the argument from inflationary cosmology, which Alan pioneered back in 1980-'81, which predicted that the universe would be flat. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. But I do do educational things, pedagogical things. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. I was a good teacher. 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? One of the best was by Bob Wald, maybe the best, honestly, on the market, and he was my colleague. I was certainly not the first to get the hint that something had to be wrong. (2013) Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the . I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. Thanks very much. And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. I suggested some speakers, and people looked at my list and were like, "These aren't string theorists at all. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. It's just like being a professor. Maybe not. We'll get into the point where I got lucky, and the universe started accelerating, and that saved my academic career. It's challenging. That was my first choice. Because the thing that has not changed about me, what I'm really fired up by, are the fundamental big ideas. And probably, there was a first -- I mean, certainly, by logical considerations, there was a first science book that I got, a first physics book. Are you particularly excited about an area of physics where you might yet make fundamental contributions, or are you, again, going back to graduate school, are you still exuberantly all over the place that maybe one of them will stick, or maybe one of them won't? 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. And Chicago was somewhere in between. If you found something like a violation of Lorentz invariants, if you found something of the violation of the Schrdinger equation in quantum mechanics, or the fundamental predictions of entanglement, or anything like 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. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. Sean Carroll. Why would an atheist find the Many Worlds Interpretation plausible? I think there have been people for many, many years who have been excellent at all three of these things individually. 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. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. So, it wasn't until I went to Catholic university that I became an outspoken atheist. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. because a huge part of my plan was to hang out with people who think about these things all the time. Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." "[51][52], In 2014, Carroll participated in a highly anticipated debate with philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig as part of the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans. My response to him was, "No thanks." The benefits you get from being around people who have all this implicit knowledge are truly incalculable, which I know because I wasn't around them. 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. It falls short of that goal in some other ways. I didn't think that it would matter whether I was an astronomy major or a physics major, to be honest. I wrote down Lagrangians and actions and models and so forth. But it's not what I do research on. I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? Sean, I wonder if a through-line in terms of understanding your motivation, generally, to reach these broad audience, is a basis of optimism in the wisdom of lay people. Fast forward to 2011. One is the word metaphysical in this sense is used in a different sense by the professional philosophical community. He said, "As long as I have to do literally nothing. I think there are some people who I don't want to have them out there talking to people, and they don't want to be out there talking to people, and that's fine. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. I think, to some extent, yes. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. Well, you know, again, I was not there at the meeting when they rejected me, so I don't know what the reasons were. We could discover that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, but some quintessence-like thing. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. So, yeah, I can definitely look to people throughout history who have tried to do these things. There was, but it was kind of splintered because of this large number of people. Talking in front of a group of people, teaching in some sense. Yeah, and being at Caltech, you have access to some of the very best graduate students that are out there. What can I write down? And I didn't. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. They have a certain way of doing things. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. 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? There was, as you know, because you listened to my recent podcast, there's a hint of a possibility of a suggestion in the CMB data that there is what is called cosmological birefringence. Is there something wrong about it?" 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. Einstein did that, but nobody had done one over R. And it wasn't like that was necessarily motivated by anything. Some places like Stanford literally have a rule. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. This is the advice I tell my students. There's definitely a semi-permeable membrane, where if you go from doing theoretical physics to doing something else, you can do that. It's literally that curvature scalar R, that is the thing you put into what we call the Lagrangian to get the equations of motion. I just drifted away very, very gradually. At the end of the interview, Carroll shares that he will move on from Caltech in two years and that he is open to working on new challenges both as a physicist and as a public intellectual. So, this dream of having a truly interdisciplinary conversation at a high intellectual level, I think, we're getting better at it. We don't know why it's the right amount, or whatever. 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. Go longer. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? Actually, Joe Silk at Berkeley, when I turned down Berkeley, he said, "We're going to have an assistant professorship coming up soon. I was there. People had known for a long time -- Alan Guth is one of the people who really emphasized this point -- that only being flat is sort of a fixed point. Then, a short time later, John Brockman, who is her husband and also in the agency, emails me out of the blue and says, "Hey, you should write a book." There are a lot of chapters, but they're all very short. The answers are: you can make the universe accelerate with such a theory. . So, many of my best classes when I was a graduate student I took at MIT. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. You can be a physicalist and still do metaphysics for your living. I never was a strong atheist, or outspoken, or anything like that. It was organized by an institution sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. It is January 4th, 2021. Someone at the status of a professor, but someone who's not on the teaching faculty. But they're really doing things that are physics. Largely, Ed Witten was the star of the show, and that's why I wanted to go to Princeton. One of the people said to me afterwards, "We thought that you'd be more suited at a place with a more pedagogical focus than what I had." An integral is measuring the area under a curve, or the volume of something. 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. 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. When you get hired, everyone can afford to be optimistic; you are an experiment and you might just hit paydirt. People like Wayne Hu came out of that. They are . So, dark energy is between minus one and zero, for this equation of state parameter. I actually think the different approaches like Jim Hartle has to teaching general relativity to undergraduates by delaying all the math are not as good as trying to just teach the math but go gently. It doesn't sound very inspired, so I think we'll pass." Again, purely intellectual fit criteria, I chose badly because I didn't know any better. Yeah, so this is a chance to really think about it. The physics department had the particle theory group, and it also had the relativity group. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. It's at least possible. My stepfather's boss's husband was a professor in the astronomy department in Villanova. Wildly enthusiastic reception. 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 members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits . I haven't given it up yet. This chair of the physics department begged me to take this course because he knew I was going to go to a good graduate school, and then he could count me as an alumnus, right? I like the idea of debate. Like, I did it. So, anyway, with the Higgs, I don't think I could have done that, but he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? They seem unnatural to us. Remember, the Higgs boson -- From Eternity to Here came out in 2010. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. It literally did the least it could possibly do to technically qualify as being on the best seller list, but it did. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. So, one of the things they did was within Caltech, they sent around a call for proposals, and they said for faculty members to give us good ideas for what to do with the money. There were some classes that were awesome, but there were some required classes that were just like pulling teeth to take. [10] Carroll thinks that over four centuries of scientific progress have convinced most professional philosophers and scientists of the validity of naturalism.

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