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?" It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. I think this is actually an excellent question, and I have gone back and forth on it. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. Not only did I not collaborate with any of the faculty at Santa Barbara, but I also didnt even collaborate with any of the postdocs in Santa Barbara. I honestly don't know where I will be next - there are possibilities, but various wave functions have not yet collapsed. She will start as a professor in July, while continuing to write for The Times Magazine. The idea of visiting the mathematicians is just implausible. 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 . So, the Caltech job with no teaching responsibilities or anything like that, where I'd be surrounded by absolutely top rate people -- because my physics research is always very highly collaborative, mostly with students, but also with faculty members. You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. They saw that they were not getting to the critical density. What is the acceleration due to gravity at that radius? It was -- I don't know. 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. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. The theorists were just beginning to become a little uncomfortable by this, and one of the measures of that discomfort is that people like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok and others, wrote papers saying even inflation can predict an open universe, a negatively curved universe. A lot of people focus on the fact that he was so good at reaching out to broad audiences, in an almost unprecedented way, that they forget that he was really a profound thinker as well. I'm not going to really worry about it. A professor's tenure may be denied for a variety of reasons, some of which are more complex. Quantum physics is about multiplicity. Either I'm traveling and lugging around equipment, or I need to drive somewhere, or whatever. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. Because, I said, you assume there's non-physical stuff, and then you derive this conclusion. 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. It might have been by K.C. We knew he's going pass." I've gotten good at it. I talked to the philosophers and classicists, and whatever, but I don't think anyone knew. Sean, I want to push back a little on this idea that not getting tenure means that you're damaged goods on the academic job market. The only way to do that is to try, so let's see what happens. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time? Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? If you change something at the higher level, you must change something at the lower level. They were all graduate students at the time. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. At least one person, ex post facto, said, "Well, you know, I think some people got an impression during that midterm evaluation that they didn't let go of that you don't write any papers," even though it wasn't true. As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. I was a postdoc at MIT from '93 to '96. He knew exactly what the point of this was, but he would say, "Why are you asking me that? (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters. She never ever discouraged me from doing it, but she had no way of knowing what it meant to encourage me either -- what college to go to, what to study, or anything like that. Tenure denial is not rare, but thoughtful information about tenure denial is rare. Maybe going back to Plato. For many interviews, the AIP retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. I do think that audience is there, and it's wildly under-served, and someday I will turn that video series into a book. I was a theorist. So, you didn't even know, as a prospective grad student, whether he was someone you would want to pick as an advisor, because who knows how long he'd be there. So, I was still sort of judging where I could possibly go on the basis of what the tuition numbers were, even though, really, those are completely irrelevant. Some people love it. We did some extra numerical simulations, and we said some things, and Vikram did some good things, and Mark did too, but I could have done it myself. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. 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. And Chicago was somewhere in between. Some of them might be. I said, "Well, yeah, I did. Drawing the line, who is asking questions and willing to learn, and therefore worth talking to, versus who is just set in their ways and not worth reaching out to? Graduate school is a different thing. Everyone knows when fields become large and strengths become large, your theories are going to break down. [21] In 2015, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[22]. I wonder if that was a quasi-alternative career that you may have considered at some point, particularly because you were so well-acquainted with what Saul Perlmutter was doing. Take the opportunity to have your mid-life crisis a little bit early. Like, when people talk about the need for science outreach, and for education and things like that, I think that there is absolutely a responsibility to do outreach to get the message out, especially if the kind of work you do has no immediate economic or technological impact. So, there is definitely a sort of comparative advantage calculation that goes on here. Just like the Hubble constant, we had tried to measure this for decades, with maybe improvement, maybe not. Again, while I was doing it, I had no idea that it would be anything other than my job, but afterward -- this is the thing. His article "Does the Universe Need God?" They brought me down, and I gave a talk, but the talk I could give was just not that interesting compared to what was going on in other areas. Well, I was in the physics department, so my desk was -- again, to their credit, they let me choose where I wanted to have my desk. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. There was no internet back then. It's at least possible. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. And that really -- the difference that when you're surprised like that, it causes a rethink. We certainly never worked together. I just don't want to do that anymore. I can just do what I want. Yard-wide in 2021, 11 men and four women, including assistant professor Carolyn Chun, applied for tenure. But that's okay. I've never cared. I'm enough of a particle physicist. So, that combination of freedom to do what I want and being surrounded by the best people convinced me that a research professorship at Caltech was better than a tenure professorship somewhere else. Theoretical cosmology at the University of Chicago had never been taught before. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. It's just like being a professor. College Park, MD 20740 I think it was like $800 million. Someone else misattributed it first, and I believed them. 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. I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. Sean, as a public intellectual with your primary identity being a scientist but with tremendous facility in the humanities and philosophy and thinking about politics, in the humanities -- there's a lot of understanding of schools of thought, of intellectual tradition, that is not nearly as prominent as it is in the sciences. Sean Carroll Height. I don't know how it reflected in how I developed, but I learn from books more than from talking to people. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. which is probably not the nicest thing he could have said at the time, but completely accurate. Like, econo-physics is a big field -- there are multiple textbooks, there are courses you can take -- whereas politico-physics doesn't exist. But I did overcome that, and I think that I would not necessarily have overcome it if I hadn't gone through it, like forced myself to being on that team and trying to get better at it. Is there something wrong about it?" It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. So, I could call up Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winning biologist who works on the origin of life, and I said, "I'm writing a book. If you spend your time as a grad student or postdoc teaching, that slows you down in doing research, which is what you get hired on, especially in the kind of theoretical physics that I do. 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. It's just they're doing it in a way that doesn't get you a job in a physics department. When I first got to graduate school, I didn't have quantum field theory as an undergraduate, like a lot of kids do when they go to bigger universities for undergrad. Well, one ramification of that is technological. I like teaching a lot. 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? So, without that money coming in randomly -- so, for people who are not academics out there, there are what are called soft money positions in academia, where you can be a researcher, but you're not a faculty member, and you're generally earning your own keep by applying for grants and taking your salary out of the grant money that you bring in. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. The whole thing was the shortest thesis defense ever. 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. We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. You go into it because you're passionate about the ideas, and so forth, and I'm interested in both the research side of academia and the broad picture side of academia.

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