why was sean carroll denied tenurewhat causes chills after knee replacement surgery

It was Mark Trodden who was telling me a story about you. and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. I got a lot of books about the planets, and space travel, and things like that, because grandparents and aunts and uncles knew that I like that stuff, right? Steven Morrow, my editor who published From Eternity to Here, called me up and said, "The world needs a book on the Higgs boson. 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. He was the one who set me up on interviews for postdocs and told me I need to get my hands dirty a little bit, and do this, and do that. The faculty members who were at Harvard, the theorists -- George Field, Bill Press, and others -- they were smart and broad enough to know that some of the best work was being done in this field, so they should hire postdocs working on that stuff. So, how did you square that circle, or what kinds of advice did you get when you were on the wrong side of these trends about having that broader perspective that is necessary for a long-term academic career? So, I raised the user friendliness of it a little bit. I continued to do that when I got to MIT. That was always true. So, it was a coin flip, and George was assigned to me, and invited me to his office and said, "What do you want to do?" We also have dark matter pulling the universe together, sort of the opposite of dark energy. On the other hand, I feel like I kind of blew it in terms of, man, that was really an opportunity to get some work done -- to get my actual job done. So, most of my papers are written with graduate students. All these cool people I couldn't talk to anymore. So, they just cut and pasted those paragraphs into their paper and made me a coauthor. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. He's supposed to answer the questions." I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. Now, I'm self-aware enough to know that I have nothing to add to the discourse on combatting the pandemic. Who possibly could have represented all of these different papers that you had put together? And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. I think to first approximation, no. You didn't have to be Catholic, but over 90% of the students were, I think. Perhaps, to get back to an earlier comment about some of the things that are problematic about academic faculty positions, as you say, yes, sometimes there is a positive benefit to trends, but on the other hand, when you're establishing yourself for an academic career, that's a career that if all goes well will last for many, many decades where trends come and go. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. So, there's path dependence and how I got there. Later on, I wrote another paper that sort of got me my faculty jobs that pointed out that dark energy could have exactly the same effect. For a lot of non-scientists, it's hard to tell the difference between particle physics and astronomy. The world has changed a lot. So, I thought, okay, and again, I wasn't completely devoted to this in any sense. Honestly, the thought of me not getting tenure just didn't occur to me, really. Get on with your life. There was so much good stuff to work on, you didn't say no to any of it, you put it all together. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. I did various things. Yeah, so actually, I should back up a little bit, because like I said, at Harvard, there were no string theorists. That's my question. It moved away. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. 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. I mean, the good news was -- there's a million initial impressions. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. A stylistic clash, I imagine. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. Maybe not. But of course, ten years later, they're observing it. Here's a couple paragraphs saying that, in physics speak." So, I will help out with organizing workshops, choosing who the postdocs are, things like that. I still don't think we've taken it seriously, the implications of the cosmological constant for fundamental physics. It is fairly non-controversial, within physics departments anyway, and I think other science departments, with very noticeable exceptions. So, the ivy leagues had, at the time -- I don't really know now -- they had a big policy of only giving need based need. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. Polchinski was there, David Gross arrived, Gary Horowitz, and Andy Strominger was still there at the time. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. Susan Cain wrote this wonderful book on introverts that really caught on and really clarified a lot of things for people. So, as the naive theorist, I said, "Well, it's okay, we'll get there eventually. So, you can apply, and they'll consider you at any time. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? I like the idea of debate. You're still faced with this enormous challenge of understanding consciousness on the basis of this physical stuff, and I completely am sympathetic with the difficulty of that problem. All the incentives are to do the same exact thing: getting money, getting resources at the university, getting collaborations, or whatever. How do you land on theoretical physics and cosmology and things like that in the library? So, Katinka wrote back to me and said, "Well, John is right." So, this is when it was beneficial that I thought differently than the average cosmologist, because I was in a particle theory group, and I felt like a particle theorist. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. Brian was the leader of one group, and he was my old office mate, and Riess was in the office below ours. 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. 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. Let's go back to the happier place of science. But other people have various ways of getting to the . Theorists never get this job. That's all it is. Bill Press, bless his heart, asked questions. So, I did, and they became very popular. So, an obvious question arises. I taught what was called a big picture course. It's funny, that's a great question, because there are plenty of textbooks in general relativity on the market. The acceleration due to gravity, of the acceleration of the universe, or whatever. One of the things is that they have these first-year seminars, like many places do. I almost wrote a book before Richard Dawkins did, but I didn't quite. In some extent, it didn't. 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. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. Even though we overlapped at MIT, we didn't really work together that much. [35] The article was solicited as a contribution to a larger work on Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Maybe it'll be a fundamental discovery that'll compel you to jump back in with two feet. So, it's incredibly liberating because I don't have to keep up with the billion other papers that people are writing in the hot topics. Carroll conveys the various push and pull factors that keep him busy in both the worlds of academic theoretical physics and public discourse. I went to church, like I said, and I was a believer, such as it was, when I was young. No, no. Because they pay for your tuition. But I think I didn't quite answer a previous question I really want to get to which is I did get offered tenured jobs, but I was still faced with a decision, what is it I want to maximize? Who hasn't written one, really? I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. Sean is /was a "Research Professor" at CalTech. But, yes, with all those caveats in mind, I think that as much as I love the ideas themselves, talking about the ideas, sharing them, getting feedback, learning from other people, these are all crucially important parts of the process to me. There's good physics reasons. I think probably the most common is mine, which is the external professorship. I don't think that was a conversion experience that I needed to have. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. By the time I got to graduate school, I finally caught on that taking classes for a grade was completely irrelevant. I think that Santa Fe should be the exception rather than the rule. He was another postdoc that was at MIT with me. I think, they're businesspeople. We theorists had this idea that the universe is simple, that omega equals one, matter dominates the universe -- it's what we called an Einstein-de Sitter in cosmology, that the density perturbations are scale-free and invariant, the dark matter is cold. What do I want to optimize for, now that I am being self-reflective about it? So, that's one of the things you walk into as a person who tries to be interdisciplinary. Being denied tenure is a life-twisting thing, and there's no one best strategy for dealing with it. Even if it were half theoretical physicists and half other things, that's a weird crazy balance. These were people who were at my level. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. 1.21 If such a state did not have a beginning, it would produce classical spacetime either from eternity or not at all. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. Well, right, and not just Caltech, but Los Angeles. When I applied for my first postdoc, like I said, I was a hot property. She could pinpoint it there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. He's a JASON as well, so he has lots of experience in policy and strategizing, and things like that. The crossover point from where you don't need dark matter to where you do need dark matter is characterized not by a length scale, but by an acceleration scale. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. I want to go back and think about the foundations, and if that means that I appeal more to philosophers, or to people at [the] Santa Fe [Institute], then so be it. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. Like, if you just discovered the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and you have a choice between two postdoc candidates, and one of them works on models of baryogenesis, which have been worked on for the last twenty years, with some improvement, but not noticeable improvement, and someone else works on brand new ways of calculating anisotropies in the microwave background, which seems more exciting to you? You're not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, everybody was telling everybody. We wrote a lot of papers together. The bottleneck is hiring you as an assistant professor. The other anecdote along those lines is with my officemate, Brian Schmidt, who would later win the Nobel Prize, there's this parameter in cosmology called omega, the total energy density of the universe compared to the critical density. I'm not sure. Usually the professor has a year to look for another job. Dark energy is a more general idea that it's some energy density in empty space that is almost constant, but maybe can go down a little bit. Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. They are . I said, "I thought about it, but the world has enough cosmology books. You're looking under the lamppost. You, as the physics department trying to convince the provost and the dean and the president that you should hire this person, that's an uphill battle, always. So, they had clearly not talked to each other. Well, most people got tenure. I'm a big believer that all those different media have a role to play. So, late 1997, Phil Lubin, who was an astronomy professor at Santa Barbara, organized a workshop at KITP on measuring cosmological parameters with the cosmic microwave background. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. So, thank you so much. But it gives lip service to the ideal of it. The article generated significant attention when it was discussed on The Huffington Post. And you mean not just in physics. So, I kind of talked with my friends. It doesn't lead to new technology. [37] Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. They did not hire me, because they were different people than were on the faculty hiring committee and they didn't talk to each other. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. Just to bring the conversation up to the present, are you ever concerned that you might need a moment to snap back into theoretical physics so that you don't get pulled out of gravity? Or a biochemist, right? It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. It would be completely blind to -- you don't get a scholarship just because you're smart. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? I want to ask, going to Caltech to become a senior research associate, did you self-consciously extricate yourself from the entire tenure world? Quantum physics is about multiplicity. 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. At the end of the five-year term, they ask all the Packard fellows to come to the meeting and give little talks on what they did. No one goes into academia for fame and fortune. 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? On the observational side, it was the birth of large-scale galaxy surveys. Carroll has appeared on numerous television shows including The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole. I have a short attention span. Ann Nelson and David Kaplan -- Ann Nelson has sadly passed away since then. You had already dipped your toe into this kind of work. It's challenging. Recently he started focusing on issues at the foundations of cosmology, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics and complexity. We'll measure it." In many ways, it was a great book. It's not quite like that but watch how fast it's spinning and use Newton's laws to figure out how much mass there is. I wanted to do it all, so that included the early universe cosmology, but I didn't think of myself as being defined as a cosmologist, even at that time. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. I really wanted to move that forward. My stepfather had gone to college, and he was an occupational therapist, so he made a little bit more money. 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. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. You couldn't pay me to stick around if they didn't want me there. It's the simplest thing you possibly could do. Why don't people think that way? And I said, "Yeah, sure." And I got to tell Sidney Coleman, and a few of the other faculty members of the Harvard physics department. It's an honor. They'd read my papers, they helped me with them, they were acknowledged in them, they were coauthors and everything. It's not a sort of inborn, natural, effortless kind of thing. So, they could be rich with handing out duties to their PhD astronomers to watch over students, which is a wonderful thing that a lot people at other departments didn't get. At Harvard, it's the opposite. I think it's gone by now. [56] The two also engaged in a dialogue in Sean Carroll's MindScape Podcast on its 28th episode. Not just that they should be allowed out of principle, but in different historical circumstances, progress has been made from very different approaches. It was a summer school in Italy. Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. There was one that was sort of interesting, counterfactual, is the one place that came really close to offering me a faculty job while I was at KITP before they found the acceleration of the universe, was Caltech. And I've learned in sort of a negative way from a lot of counterexamples about how to badly sell the ideas that science has by just hectoring people and berating them and telling them they're irrational. Part of that is why I spend so much time on things like podcasts and book writing. But it's not what I do research on. If you actually take a scientific attitude toward the promotion of science, you can study what kinds of things work, and what kinds of approaches are most effective.

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