I’m now a Ph.D. This has been the greatest relief and, simultaneously, anti-climax of my life. This blog is partly a reflection on what I have observed in academia and how it has transformed what I imagined it to be, what it has often been sold as. Physics is so revered by the public but I wonder how many of them understand what it is as a subject and a profession. Most have had some intimidating or invalidating exposure to the subject which gives those who do it some level of respect and reverence yet, it is academia, and the public has developed a wariness of this place. I once believed this was because of a campaign waged against the left and an anti-intellectual bias that has been endemic to America. These are certainly true but now I see the failing in the structures from the inside and can weigh the corrosion from the other side of the veiled bubble.
Academia, the collection of colleges and universities, has its own sort of economy and traditionally semi-socialistic structure. There is a market for degrees and the status, credentials and connections they provide. Faculty can have great control in their own departments through their voting voice and tenured station. These aspects of the institutions have been changing as schools come under greater economic pressure and for-profit institutions arise. The role of government money and subsidized loans have along with ever more credentialism in the workplace have driven greater enrollments and the push for higher degrees. A secondary force is the mystique of academia as a place for the best and most idealistic people to work unhampered by the insecurities and pressures of the market. The bills get paid in a different manner than most businesses and we accept that academics need to be insulated from the turbulence of markets because of their great investment and sacrifice to reach such high and specialized levels which would leave them impaired and behind in the world complementary to the academy.
Sciences and engineering have evolved quite differently from the humanities. Their capacity to draw in large amounts of money for the universities puts them in a privileged category at some schools. This then places an additional burden and benchmark for such faculty. Rather than merely needing books, paper, a small travel budget, office and salary, they are expected to bring in the money that pays for themselves and much of the university operations. This can be a great financial boon for a few star faculty but it has also spurred higher gradations in the tenure and professorship process to provide ever higher incentives so this “productivity” does not wane. Professors in these areas who cease grant writing potency or motivation are shifted into more tedious and onerous teaching assignments and administrative duties. This is the “stick” that continues beyond the desperate treadmill of tenure complimentary to the “carrot” of higher professorship.
In the humanities, it is assumed your financial getting ability is puny. These faculty often have lower salaries and, more and more, are simply lowly adjuncts, the loft dwelling and futureless Walmart workers of the academy. If the goal is simply to create more degreed people with some greater skills for the workforce, maybe this is not so bad. In our country the assumption is often that those that seek careers in teaching should expect hard work, few rewards and little respect. If only because of market forces, this can be defensible. A shocking number of people still pursue jobs as professors.
There is another side of academia: publishing. The forces behind this are both internal and external. The external forces are the university rankings. The number of publications and their various measures of status are competed for, so the administrations push for structures that compel faculty to fill this need. Internally, the faculty themselves use this as a measure of respect and relevance in their respective fields. The faculty control the journals through editorship and refereeing. Structural problems with this system are defeated by the feature that those who have prospered by the current rules are those who set and have a role in changing them. In the humanities, it can be argued that the consequences of degenerating and off-course work is small. The latest trends in French literature affect few and the swings and entrenched battles only interest the participants.
In the sciences things are different. We are all profoundly affected by the progress in science and the general education that filters out of these subjects to engineering and other applied fields. Ossification and selfish or deluded entrenchment of positions because they favor the career and ego of those who profit from the established paradigm do not serve society. I am particularly interested in physics, a subject divided among theory, experiment and computation. The safest from such corruption is experiment. Frauds can only persist in little backwater subjects or for a short time. The need to reproduce something important is simply too great. In contrast, computation has plenty of room for bad behavior. Computers are a wonderful box that will always give some result. There are large budgets for big computing projects and whole journals crop up that are purely to showcase the latest results to be reviewed by the other people that see such work as important and a round-robin trunk-shake of citations ensue. Theory is certainly the most prone to corruption and bombastic rubbish. The mathematics involved can easily be jacked up to unapproachable proportions so external review becomes impossible. Prima donnas can approach journalists with fantastical propositions to a public hungry for magic and science fiction. Through a similar trunk-jiggle the citations proliferate and flow across the untouchable club of vested careerists.
Theory is much less expensive than experiment so one can argue that this sort of corruption is not so harmful. Unfortunately, correct theory is important for everyone. The experimentalists are now held to a standard that presenting data without a theory is generally disallowed. (One has to wonder how data leading a major upending of our understanding would now ever get presented.) To even couch the problems and conceive of experiments often requires the framework of theory.
Our phobia of “cranks” has led to a high walled fort of vigorously (and condescendingly) defended little fiefdoms where foundational criticism, even when brought at a high standard, is ruled not publishable. The great irony of this is that our current theory, even the part that seems to work (so string theory aside), is often not on a healthy footing. Quantum mechanics has fundamental questions remaining in how it connects with the apparently classical world. Quantum field theory is know to be logically inconsistent (Haag’s theorem) and has never been more that an ever more finessed ansatz of calculation. Statistical mechanics, especially in the quantum case, is of an essentially ad hoc nature.
These theories actually give very good results (at least for the problems we have collected in books). The problem with complacency here is that our poor foundations do have consequences. We continually create systems that seem to sit on the boundary of classical and quantum physics. Decoherence is (often emotionally) argued to be a solution here but many still have doubts this is true (and are often unclear what the proponents are actually saying). Field theory has no unification for gravity and it is not known if it even can have one. Classical stat mech has exciting new results like the Cohen-Gallavotti theorem for which no quantum analog can be formed and nonequilibrium problems are still being attacked in a plethora of ad hoc methods with no fundamental approach apparent.
Future entries to this blog will be elaborations and proposed fixes to some of these problems and well and expounding on some subtle paradoxes that have been overlooked in the very mathy yet conceptually slip-shod approach to physics that has been dominant since at least the 1950’s. I also plan to discuss some history, particularly in how the structures and pressures of academia have led to this place, where an excessive reverence for work done by a “Pantheon” of past Nobel laureates and uncritical calculation has led to some enduring messes that hold back science.
Physics Patch 