It might be a good idea that is promising in the moment and doesn't pan out. So, I gave a talk, and I said, "Look, something is wrong." Gordon Moore of Moore's law fame, who was, I think, a Caltech alumnus, a couple years before I was denied tenure, he had given Caltech the largest donation that anyone had ever given to an American institute of higher education. Benefits of tenure. Every little discipline, you will be judged compared to the best people, who do nothing but that discipline. All these people who are now faculty members at prestigious universities. I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. And, yeah, it's just incredibly touching that you've made an impact on someone's life. 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. Were there tenure lined positions that were available to you, but you said, you know what, I'm blogging, I'm getting into outreach, I'm doing humanities courses. I had another very formative experience when I was finally a junior faculty member. You were at a world-class institution, you had access to the best minds, the cutting edge science, with all of the freedom to pursue all of your other ideas and interests. "It's not the blog," Carroll titled his October 11 entry after receiving questions about his and Drezner's situations. So, it's not an easy hill to climb on. There's always some institutional resistance. So, that's what he would do. I did various things. I just worked with my friends elsewhere on different things. So far so good. You can be surprised. Carroll, S.B. It might have been by K.C. Sean Carroll, who I do respect, has blogged no less than four times about the idea that the physics underlying the "world of everyday experience" is completely understood, bar none. Even if you can do remote interviews, even if it's been a boon to work by yourself, or work in solitude as a theoretical physicist, what are you missing in all of your endeavors that you want to get back to? That was a glimpse of what could be possible. And they had atomic physics, which I thought was interesting, and Seattle was beautiful. This is a non-tenured position. So, these days, obviously, all of my podcasts interviews have been remote, but I'm thinking most of them are just going to continue to be that way going forward. They're probably atheists but they think that matter itself is not enough to account for consciousness, or something like that. That's absolutely true. There's an equation you can point to. There's a few, but it's a small number. Then why are you wasting my time? And it was a . So, it's sort of bifurcated in that way. And then a couple years later, when I was at Santa Barbara, I was like, well, the internet exists. It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. And Sidney was like, "Why are we here? In my book, The Big Picture, I suggested this metaphor of what I called planets of belief. Tenure is, "in its ideal sense, an affirmation that confers membership among a community of scholars," Khan wrote. You could actually admit it, and if people said, what are your religious beliefs? But honestly, for me, as the interviewer, number one, it's enormously more work to do an interview in person. Sean, just as in earlier in life, your drift away from religion, as you say, was not dramatic. 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. I'm curious, in your relatively newer career as an interviewer -- for me, I'm a historian. So, they knew everything that I had done. tell me a little bit about them and where they're from. That was always temporary. And part of it was because no one told me. This is not anything really about me, but it's sort of a mention of sympathy to anyone out there who's in a similar situation. Also, they were all really busy and tired. That's less true if what you're doing is trying to derive a new model for dark matter or for inflation, but when what you're trying to do is more foundational work, trying to understand the emergence of spacetime, or the dynamics of complex systems, or things like that, then there are absolutely ways in which this broader focus has helped me. Melville, NY 11747 You've got to find the intersection. Having said that, they're still really annoying. In fact, that even helped with the textbook, because I certainly didn't enter the University of Chicago as a beginning faculty member in 1999, with any ambitions whatsoever of writing a textbook. But it goes up faster than the number of people go up, and it's because you're interacting with more people. More than one. Yeah, there's no question the Higgs is not in the same tier as the accelerated universe. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. So, I'm doing a little bit out of chronological order, I guess, because the point is that Brian and Saul and Adam and all their friends discovered that the universe is not decelerating. So, that was my first glimpse at purposive, long term strategizing within theoretical physics. Frank Merritt, who was the department chair at the time, he crossed his arms and said, "No, I think Sean's right. Garca Pea's first few years at Harvard were clouded by these interactions, but from the start her students . Or, I could say, "Screw it." We're kind of out of that. They'll hire you as a new faculty member, not knowing exactly what you're going to do, but they're like, alright, let's see. Honestly, maybe they did, but I did always have a slightly "I'll be fine" attitude. 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. It wasn't really clear. I'm close enough. Oh, kinds of physics. Often, you can get as good or better sound quality remotely. And also, of course, when I'm on with a theoretical physicist, I'm trying to have a conversation at a level that people can access. The person who most tried to give me advice was Bill Press, actually, the only one of those people I didn't write a paper with. He used that to offer me a job, to pay my salary. So, his response was to basically make me an offer I couldn't refuse in terms of the financial reward that would be accompanying writing this book. My only chance to become famous is if they discovered cosmological birefringence. It's taken as a given that every paper will have a different idea of what that means. 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. People didn't take him seriously. But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. It's only being done for the sake of discovery, so we need to share those discoveries with people. I remember, on the one hand, I did it and I sat down thinking it was really bad and I didn't do very well. They wanted me, and every single time I turned them down. So, it made it easy, and I asked both Alan and Eddie. But to go back a little bit, when I was at MIT -- no, let's go back even further. They've tried to correct that since then, but it was a little weird. What's so great about right now? Literally, two days before everything closed down, I went to the camera store and I bought a green screen, and some tripods, and whatever, and I went online and learned how to make YouTube videos. We were sort of in that donut hole where they made enough to not get substantial financial aid, but not enough to be able to pay for me to go to college. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. He was a blessing, helping me out. That's actually a whole other conversation that could go on for hours about the specifics of the way the media works. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. But the fruits of the labors had not come in yet. So the bad news is. I think it's perfectly rational in that sense. It's the path to achieving tenure. In that short period of time he was even granted tenure. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. Forensics, in the sense of speech and debate. We made a bet not on what the value of omega would be, but on whether or not we would know the value of omega twenty years later. All of the ability I have to give talks, and anything like that, has come from working at it. These are all very, very hard questions. Who did you work with? It's not a good or a bad kind. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. So, we'd already done R plus a constant. And he's like, "Sure." 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. And I thought about it, and I said, "Well, there are good reasons to not let w be less than minus one. I went on expeditions with the dinosaur hunters as a public outreach thing. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. 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. Graduate school is a different thing. It was very long. And I'm not sure how conscious that was on my own part, but there's definitely a feeling that I've had for a while, however long back it goes, that in some sense, learning about fundamental theoretical physics is the hardest thing to learn about. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. Let me ask you that question specifically on the topic of religion. So, between the two of us, and we got a couple of cats a couple years ago, the depredations that we've had to face due to the pandemic are much less onerous for us than they are for most people. 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? Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. Stephen later moved from The Free Press to Dutton, which is part of Penguin, and he is now my editor. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. I think that's true in terms of the content of the interview, because you can see someone, and you can interrupt them. 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. 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. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. Literally, I've not visited there since I became an external professor because we have a pandemic that got in the way. That was always true. I'll just put them on the internet. But I would guess at least three out of four, or four out of five people did get tenure, if not more. And I did use the last half of the book as an excuse to explain some ideas in quantum field theory, and gauge theory, and symmetry, that don't usually get explained in popular books. I did an episode with Kip Thorne, and I would ask him questions. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. Let's start with the research first. I'm not sure how much time passed. 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. In fact, I got a National Science Foundation fellowship, so even places that might have said they don't have enough money to give me a research assistantship, they didn't need that, because NSF was paying my salary. Certainly, no one academic in my family. 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? I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. I could have probably done the same thing had I had tenure, also. He was born to his father and mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. This gets tricky for the casual observer because the distinction is not always made clear. In particular, there was a song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called The Only Way, which was very avowedly atheist. Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. So, not whether atheism is true or false, but how it developed intellectually. This is really what made Cosmos, for example, very, very special at the time. There haven't been any for decades, arguably since the pion was discovered in 1947, because fundamental physics has understood enough about the world that in order to create something that is not already understood, you need to build a $9 billion particle accelerator miles across. As much as I love those people, I should have gone somewhere else and really shocked my system a little bit. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. The problem is not that everyone is a specialist, the problem is that because universities are self-sustaining, the people who get hired are picked by the people who are already faculty members there. 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. 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. It also has as one of its goals promoting a positive relationship between science and religion. This happens quite often. What are the odds? It does not lead -- and then you make something, and it disappears in a zeptosecond, 10^-21 seconds. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of. I love that, and they love my paper. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more. 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. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. In late 1997, again, by this time, the microwave background was in full gear in terms of both theorizing it and proposing new satellites and new telescopes to look at it. That's all it is. Carroll endorses Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and denies the existence of God. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? And I've guessed. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. At the time, . Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? Now, you might ask, who cares? At Chicago, you hand over your CV, and you suggest some names for them to ask for letters from. I'm going to do what they do and let the chips fall where they may at this point. You should not let w be less than minus one." I am so happy to be here with Dr. Sean M. Carroll. I didn't do what I wanted to do. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. Like I aspire to do, he was actually doing. Also, assistant professor, right? So, for you, in your career, when did cosmology become something where you can proudly say, "This is what I do. Also in 2012, Carroll teamed up with Michael Shermer to debate with Ian Hutchinson of MIT and author Dinesh D'Souza at Caltech in an event titled "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? Nearly 40 faculty members from the journalism school signed an online statement on Wednesday calling for the decision to be reversed, saying the failure to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones "unfairly moves the goal posts and violates longstanding norms and established processes.". Instead of tenure, Ms. Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year contract as a professor, with an option for review. So, it's not quite a perfect fit in that sense. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . I think it's part of a continuum. Well, you could measure the rate at which the universe was accelerating, and compare that at different eras, and you can parameterize it by what's now called the equation of state parameter w. So, w equaling minus one, for various reasons, means the density of the dark energy is absolutely constant. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less .
The Man With The Saxophone Poem Analysis,
Lamar Cisd Police Department Jobs,
Articles W