I disagree with the article's premises and conclusions, my perspective is that of a physicist who also knows many lapsed physicists.
The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproduction thesis, I just don't think it applies to physics".
OK lets talk about that then.
If there is something that's gone wrong with pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge it isn't a lack of bodies producing the standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication". These have grown exponentially. I don't think I've seen anyone even argue the rate of knowledge increase is growing commensurately. It *might* be the case that new knowledge requires exponentially more people looking for it but that's a pretty different article. Personally, I'm skeptical more NSF funding would help.
I do agree with this part:
Our apparatus of scientific education, especially mathematics education, is deeply flawed. It takes too long to bring young people to the research front, and it produces a false view of what doing science is really like.
But this research is in a academic setting, and there is definitely, unambiguously, an overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available. Letting more new students in the door wouldn't help anyone!
> overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available
Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries.
That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we need more efficient scientific communication before we can make good use of more researchers.
Maybe what we need is cheaper physics apparatus so you don't need a physics professorship or a big lab to advance the state of human knowledge. You aren't going to scale down the LHC to fit under your bed when you aren't using it, but you could surely fit an XRF, ICP-AES, AFM, and maybe an optical bench in there. For a while I worked at a satellite company whose first cleanroom was made only a few years back by covering the concrete walls with polyethylene film, and a class-10 clean bench that you stick your hands into is within the reach of lots of people. Lots of amateurs have built fusors, but mostly they aren't doing the work necessary to measure reliable, reproducible results, in part because Vixra doesn't offer any incentive to do so. Radio amateurs are one shining exception here, even if most of them are just using store-bought equipment these days.
You'll also need to pay for the people doing the research to buy houses, have cars, retirement savings, raise families, and have a decent quality of life too.
Add that to a bare bones optics lab with a few staff and you will be running about $1 million startup costs for benches, lasers, optics, closed loop cryogencics, He4, interferometers, etc, plus half a million a year salary costs for 3-5 people in a low cost of living area.
It would also need job security to be competitive with going into something like data science, making the startup costs a careers worth of funding otherwise it would be insanity to choose.
Source: PhD in quantum optics, no longer do science.
> You'll also need to pay for the people doing the research to buy houses, have cars, retirement savings, raise families, and have a decent quality of life too.
Newton and Cavendish didn't have any of those, except that Cavendish had retirement savings. So while not having houses, cars, retirement savings, the ability to raise a family, and a decent quality of life might be a reason for not achieving more than Newton or Cavendish, it's not a reason for achieving less.
(I suspect that raising a family is actually counterproductive. I've seen an awful lot of promising researchers of both genders stop publishing after their first baby.)
I don't have any of those things, but while I'm no Newton or Cavendish, I can't attribute the difference to my lack of a car. Most of the people in my country don't have any of those except for houses; most of the people here who own houses built them with their own hands rather than buying them.
It's true that if you have to choose between going into data science and owning your own house and car, or doing quantum optics while living in poverty, the former is a lot better for you. But for most of us it's not an either-or choice:
1. Why not both? Lagrange did a significant amount of his work while subsisting on a day job teaching ballistics to gunners. Vipul Ved Prakash wrote Vipul's Razor by working one month out of the year in Delhi, then spending the other 11 months up in the mountains working on whatever he wanted to. Sidis deliberately didn't do anything others would consider useful, surviving on a series of menial jobs, but if he'd turned his formidable intellect on the problems of automatic computation or chemistry instead of collecting streetcar transfers, possibly he would have made significant progress. I've been living on US$6k a year, so a single year of a US$250k salary and stock package at Google or Fecebutt would allow me to survive for 40 years.
2. For most of us, it's neither. Most people don't have a data-science job available, or cars, or job security, or retirement savings. Given the choice between spending your spare time on watching Westworld and setting up experiments with Kerr cells and third-harmonic-generation crystals, what could possibly make the former a better choice? Though I'm one to talk! Here I am wasting my time commenting on the orange website, arguing about physics with people (who aren't you) whose understanding of physics evidently comes from WGBH Boston.
So, while I agree that everyone should live in material abundance, I don't agree with your apparent conclusion that more abundance of non-experimental-apparatus material goods would boost the world's research productivity. Many more people can buy houses, buy cars, have retirement savings, and raise families than 50 or 100 years ago, while the speed of scientific advancement has increased only modestly.
Hmm, are you saying that high Tc superconductivity, the Geiger-Marsden results falsifying the plum-pudding model, and the quantum Hall effect were predicted theoretically before they were discovered empirically? I thought that these were three of the more spectacular cases of unexpected experimental results that bore great theoretical fruit.
Possibly you intended to post your comment in reply to one of Jensson's comments rather than mine?
Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc.
Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 years later data was found in those experiments to match the theory. What we lack today to further physics isn't experiments, we lack theories that are well formed enough that we can perform experiments to test them.
"The fasted way to get the right answer is to post the wrong one on the internet"
Actually, Kepler came before Newton. Kepler's laws of planetary motion were derived from observations of others. They also follow straightforwardly from Newton's laws of motion. In particular, Kepler's second law is equivalent to conservation of angular momentum. Kepler's third law is equivalent to "Newton's universal gravitation + conservation of angular momentum". And Kepler's first is a consequence of Newtonian kinematics. That is to say, Newton generalized Kepler's laws.
Similarly with Einstein: His theoretical treatment of Brownian motion was based on observations by... Robert Brown half a century ealier. The photoelectric effect (for which Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize) was an extension of theoretical work by Plank, who started theorizing to explain observations made by Hertz.
Special Relativity resolved a conflict between E&M and Mechanics, but it was really needed to explain why the Michelson-Morley experiment couldn't find a difference in the speed of light, despite increasingly-sophisticated apparatus (which was an unsolved paradox for a quarter of a century before SR was invented).
And, while not on your list, quantum theory had many experimental inspirations. The Millikan oil drop experiment, for one. And spectral lines in stellar observations, for another.
Einstein's work on relativity (01905) was inspired by the Michelson-Morley experiment (01887), less than 20 years before, and its many improved replications. His work on the photoelectric effect was inspired by Hertz's experimental discovery of it (also 01887), followed by numerous further experiments which clarified the nature of the effect. Although Brownian motion had been observed, in some sense, since Lucretius (00060 BCE), Brown's 01827 observations under a microscope less than a century before were crucial to Einstein's theorizing about it.
Newton's work on orbital mechanics, which gave rise to understanding of universal gravitation (published 01687 but finished years earlier), derived from Kepler's laws of planetary motion (01621, say) and his published tables of planetary observations (01627), the Tabulae Rudolphinae. Not coincidentally, Kepler is also known for his dramatic improvements in the tele-scope, but much of the improvement in the Tabulae was actually due to the meticulous work done at the pre-telescope observatory of his predecessor Brahe, a huge stone structure.
Certainly the traffic between theoretical physics and experimental physics is not entirely a one-way flow from experiment to theory; that would lead only to the sort of overfitting we find in Ptolemy. But neither is it, as you paint it, entirely a one-way flow from theory to experiment.
It's probably true that we aren't going to resolve the problem of quantum gravity, dark matter, or consciousness with experiments, because our theories aren't good enough to design the experiments yet. But turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, and especially quantum computers are eminently subject to experiment.
(Although I disagree with your comment, it certainly seems to be made in good faith, so I deplore the knuckle-draggers who are downvoting it.)
The Ultraviolet Catastrophe was discovered immediately after theoretical physicists derived the radiation law, the limit was theory and not experiments there as well. And the most important part here is that another physicist had already derived an alternative radiation law at the time that fit perfectly with the observed deviation and had a good explanation for it: Quantum Physics.
Edit: The problem with physics today is exactly like back then, we have no predictions to test. If someone comes up with a new theory that joins quantum physics with gravity in a way that is consistent with all past experiments, then we can test that. But there is no such theory today, nobody has figured out a way that the domains can work together.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119 I listed a lot of the big unsolved problems in physics, though many would argue that the question of how consciousness arises isn't part of physics. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29153894 I also listed a lot of recent advances, many of which came from experimental physics. Some of those problems are susceptible to experimental investigation even with the theories we have.
But, aside from these big problems, many smaller problems are susceptible to experimental investigation. You may not create an Einstein-style paradigm shift by detecting CNO-fusion neutrinos from the sun, observing Higgs decay, improving quantum-dot solar cells, fabricating nanotube rope whose strength approaches that of a single nanotube, understanding the lubricity of BAM well enough to design more similar materials, deriving useful energy from the fission of lithium, making a metamaterial with a higher Young's modulus than diamond with negative-elasticity inclusions, constructing logic gates out of fluid vortices, building a usable hypersonic plasmoid pistol (one that doesn't require explosive flux compression pumping!), building transistors that function at 800 degrees, finding a SHS route to cubic boron nitride, making a 50-tesla magnetic field in the lab, finding a way to construct quantum-dot solar panels that's cheap and scalable enough to undercut poly-Si, confining a particle of gold in a stable minimum of the Casimir potential, or finding a way to fabricate high-quality optics apparatus rapidly out of aluminum foil; but the obstacles to these problems are (or were) mostly not that we don't have any useful hypotheses to test.
Rajchman had two students, one of whom (Antoni Zygmund, who also studied under Mazurkiewicz, and founded the Chicago school of analysis) had 40 students, five of whom had over 100 students of their own. 18 of those 40 had at least one student of their own. Consequently Rajchman had 1658 descendants in only a century, a mentorship growth rate of 7.7% per year despite Rajchman himself having his career cut short by being murdered by the Nazis in 01940 and apparently ceasing to mentor anyone officially for the previous 15 years of his career.
Yes but the exponential scaling doesn't really work to anyone's benefit. It just means that N people can each mentor an average of N people and so on and so forth. An active community means that the people who are working on the problems can all share results and bring people up to speed. I'm not convinced THIS scales well.
I can buy more people in physics working on more problems. There are a wealth of interesting problems in physics and more people all going in different directions would be great. But ten times as many people working on the LHC? A hundred times as many people working on string theory? I don't buy it.
To me, the ideal model of fully open, accessible research is the speedrunning community. I don't see speedrunning as all that different from experimental work. You probe, you hypothesize, you have breakthroughs, you compete in what's generally a pretty healthy way, and you communicate and document. Look at how this scales, how many people get in and get obsessed, etc. To really master quantum hall, you need to have have a devotion to the field that's comparable to "completing Super Mario 64 with half an A press."
Yeah, although maybe mentorship can scale reasonably well (or at any rate much faster than we are scaling it at present), I agree with you about collaboration: ten times as many people working on the LHC (or HEP in general) probably wouldn't be very effective. Now that we have Sci-Hub, the General Index, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, and Google Scholar, we can probably collaborate a little more effectively than before, but not enough to cram orders of magnitude of people into a given subfield.
There might be a path forward in the work on making computational work easily reproducible, by people like Konrad Hinsen, Yihui Xie, Jeremiah Orians, Eelco Dolstra, Ludovic Courtès, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Ricardo Wurmus, and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, but clearly it hasn't been a panacea so far. Speedrunning results are in many cases reproducible by virtue of nailed-down console hardware and bit-identical game images, but that's harder to achieve even for FEM simulations of turbulent MHD systems, much less actual experimental MHD systems like a Farnsworth fusor.
How do people initially get up to speed on speedrunning? Are there tutorials, the equivalent of a textbook with problem sets, some other onramp? Can we gamify learning quantum mechanics? (I've tried QiskitBlocks but so far haven't been impressed.)
Scientific apparatus is by definition “pre-engineering.” It’s low volume and generally designed by a few people with no BOM optimization. OTOH, everything that’s engineered is generally just EE or optics lab stuff that’s already high volume and aggressively cost optimized. Good luck making a cheap MBE or dilution fridge, and good luck making a 10 GHz oscilloscope cheaper.
I've been seeing a lot of 3-D printed FDM parts showing up in labs in recent years. Of course you can't 3-D print an MBE or FIB, but maybe you could automate the manufacturing of some significant apparatus to the point where you really could download a cutfile from Thingiverse, cut it out on a CNC plasma table, and have it MIG-welded together by robots, so that, like custom T-shirts or FDM-printable parts, it can be cheap even without being high-volume. Even some high-vacuum apparatus might be accessible by that kind of route. A friend of mine has been doing a lot of optics fabrication via UV stereolithography.
* GTRI
* Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
* MIT Lincoln Labs
* ~All the national labs (NIST, Argonne, etc...)
They are still mostly full as I understand.
If I was to write an article on what might be improved: We need more translational research (product focused, using existing knowledge) and less academic research.
One problem I see is that there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization in physics like there is in comp sci or biotech.
Granted I'm biased. I founded my company (zeroK NanoTech) to capitalize on laser cooling research. Two Nobel prizes and countless professors pushing the boundaries on this stuff since the 90's. And my little company is going to be the first to deliver a product that's a black box to the user wrt to the science but delivers some new capabilities. The ion trap quantum computing may yet pay (much larger) dividends to society and those guys are also now making big pushes as well. Might be fair to count the resurgence of rocketry and fusion in this category as well.
" there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization"
I worked in tech transfer for a bit.
There isn't such a thing as 'translation of science' because knowledge itself is pretty useless, even applied research is.
Products - which hopefully embody some of those things - are what people buy and the things that go into making good products are a bit orthogonal to classical R&D approach. Thinking about things from a 'user centric' instead of things having 'intrinsic' value is a big leap that I think takes a few years for some to get.
In Academia we think of knowledge as having inherent meaning and value unto it's own - which is totally fine I'm not hear to argue otherwise.
But in the real world, it's almost as if you have to view Science as just 'fancy pants tooling' and give it about as much love as your ruler or hammer, i.e. think of it as just a tool to meet some 'ends' wherein the 'ends' is not 'publishing a paper'.
In biotech, the 'ends' maybe more mappable, i.e. 'this drug regrows hair in men and women' but as you indicate, it mostly doesn't work this way.
Even then, even if we got our surplus PhD's into industry, we still may have this over-capacity.
So all of that aside, maybe we are entering the phase where the standard/normative level of education is just really, really high. Like in one of those corny Star Trek places where everyone has a PhD.
Just like many of the wealthy, effete folks in the past who got degrees because they were rich and not even interested in pursuing something applied or interesting, 'we're all getting rich now' and perhaps should turn our focus to the 5B people on planet earth who still have material needs.
Translational research is its own subfield in biotech too. And it's plausibly one key place where a lot of low-hanging fruit might still be hidden, both in biotech and in the harder sciences. In general, it would be nice if academia did its part as an alternate, fully formalized source of what's usually left to tacit "folk" know-how in all sorts of industry-relevant pursuits.
True that, with the caveat that biotech has much longer development cycles, and often socialized markets, which make them an odd fit for scrappy entrepreneurs and VC.
Personally I think we are turning discoveries into products pretty fast, at the least faster than any time in history. My thought was that we need more fundamental discoveries (e.g. like understanding gravity or theories that predict and unlock high temperature superconductors), but the people who discover those things needn't be teaching staff.
> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions?
Because it's cheaper that way. A lab that had to pay market-rate salaries would be outcompeted by the ones that sucker grad students with the promise that a few of them might get tenure someday and pay them peanuts in the meantime.
Academics can subsidize some research costs through tuition and splitting work researchers do to teaching. It's a business model that has been working well because of ever increasing demand for people to get at least a bachealors degree. It's not really about tenure per se, it's more that the academic business model can provide a stable revenue stream for some research work.
Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants. These environments are highly unstable in terms of job security. Positions are tied to a grant or a mixture of grants and difficult to maintain. If one or enough sources fail and the role is completely paid through grant money, it suddenly becomes untenable and people leave the role. The advantage academic environments have is that revenue stream to cushion the instability and provide stability.
It also lures in cheaper labor from grad students and post docs which helps.
I had the impression that even at very prestigious schools lab funding is mostly from grants.
I'd be interested to see how much of, say, the UNC Chapel Hill chemistry department's research expenditures come out of grants. Do you know how I'd find the information?
Two other points:
> Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants.
In what sense is the first case, a business sponsoring the lab, not "grants"?
> It's not really about tenure per se, it's more that the academic business model can provide a stable revenue stream for some research work.
But the original claim was that the cost of employing researchers is lower for an academic lab than it would be for a new lab. ("other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.") That has nothing to do with the availability of funding or cross-subsidies! Is it true or not?
Grants are definitely also important in academia, but at least the base salary of professors and some of the grad students ends up being covered by the university out of separate revenue sources (mostly tuition, but sometimes state funding or endowment), which makes it a bit easier. It also means that if you go a few years between grants you still get paid, and you can still get your grad students paid by having them be TAs for classes (instead of RAs on your grants). I'm not sure how to get hard data on what percentage of expenditures in a given department come from which sources, which would definitely be interesting.
There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants! They have no teaching responsibilities, since the university isn't directly paying them anything. But imo this is a much more stressful arrangement since you don't have the regular university salary to fall back on. Some researchers at small companies are essentially like that, having to bring in a stream of SBIRs to keep themselves paid.
I don't think researchers' base employment necessarily has to go through universities, it's just ended up as the most common mechanism for researchers to get a stable salary. The Institute for Advanced Study [1] is an alternate model, funding researchers' salaries out of its nearly $1 billion endowment and a stream of donations and institution-level grants, without being attached to a university. Kind of like a "think tank", but for science. But institutions along that model currently (at least in the U.S.) employ a tiny number of researchers compared to either universities or industrial research labs.
> I'm not sure how to get hard data on what percentage of expenditures in a given department come from which sources, which would definitely be interesting.
Well, I picked UNC Chapel Hill as the example mostly because it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?
I'm perfectly happy to do the calculation in terms of "the chemistry department spend $X this year, and received $Y in grants, so their funding comes out of grants in a Y/X proportion".
> There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants!
I was aware of this (well, not that there was a title difference), but there is something I've been wondering about.
When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? It obviously doesn't constitute corruption or embezzlement to help yourself to some of the grant money -- that's what a salary is. How much of it can you take?
> it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?
Public university budgets should generally be public information, but tbh I don't have any idea where I'd start looking for granular data, especially in an easy to process format.
> When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? ... How much of it can you take?
Yeah, pay is itemized on grants. Despite being expected to bring in your own salary, there is still some kind of official pay grade you're at. How that's set when you're hired I don't have great insight into (I imagine it varies a lot). But after the initial hire generally pay raises work the same as with any other faculty (annual cost of living or merit increases, occasional promotions between ranks, etc.). The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits. People on soft money positions sometimes piece together support from multiple grants. So you might write a grant as PI asking for 75% support over 3 years, then on a different grant your colleague is writing, they ask for money to cover 25% of your time as co-PI over 3 years. Larger institutions might also have some internal money available to smooth over shortfalls. Also, some agencies have a salary cap (e.g. NIH's is $200k).
> The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits.
This seems like it would tend to promote collusion between researchers and universities, where whenever somebody is hired into a soft money position, they would prefer to have a high official salary, and the university doesn't care because the actual salary is $0. The granting agencies aren't a party to salary negotiations -- what's keeping salaries down? Say someone's job is to get grants from NIH. Why would they ever be salaried below $200k?
Your assessment is dead on. This is becoming more common in research related positions. For many years, I've "paid" almost the entirety of my salary in similar roles, I essentially pay a toll to an institution for its name, prestige, and connections as well as networking opportunities to support my continued employment.
The reason you don't set starting salaries too high is that for the business managing this (be it a university, private lab, etc.), although they essentially hire someone who makes money for them and pays their salaries through overhead costs that almost always exist (indirect costs), if you set the salary too high the role won't be able to reliably maintain itself, and therefor the indirect percentage you draw from incoming grants from that role becomes less stable. You could set a research associate for a fresh post doc at say $500k, but they'll probably never be able to pay themselves and therefor you because they won't be able to secure that. So you'll constantly be hiring for that position so it has to drop down to an amount that can be reliably filled and reliably bring in money.
From the institution's perspective, they want to get your comp rate as high as they possibly can to maintain their salaries but not to a point where it self sabotages their own position. The way these institutions maintain their administrative positions is to find these sweet spots and then diversify risk by hiring more and more researchers to pull in money for themselves and their own salaries. If several fail to pull in grants, admin is cushioned by the total number of grants (likely enough pulled in grants to provide enough indirect for admin). Take the additional pool and reinvest it in research so you get researchers to do even more free work for you. Some research orgs I've seen have incredibly high turn over rates (on the order of 1-2 years) and their model seems to be as long as they can keep a fresh batch of unsuspecting individuals in at high enough rates they can draw grants and indirect from to pay their salaries, it doesn't matter if that individual hired becomes resource pressured and burns out, there's a line of other qualified people more than happy to step in and naively fall into the same game. Rinse repeat.
Eventually it can tarnish the reputation of the organization itself where external money pools stop looking at the person receiving the grant but more at the organization of the person receiving the grant where they begin to lose faith that the organization can follow through on its employees promises. There seems to be enough turnover from funding agencies and the research orgs that do this themselves that institutional memory is short enough to keep the whole game going on. It's getting to a point at some organizations where people who pull in grants are joining the same gig as the research org and the idea is to act as a figurehead to the project where they then convince naive other lower level research positions to do most the legwork and pay themselves a portion of the total grant acting as another layer of administration. You'll see such grant recipients often as the recipient or lead on multiple grants they couldn't possibly be working on all of simultaneously. They play similar risk games to the research orgs that employ them in that if those they hire can't follow through, they may lose their own role.
It's quite a gig in some places, a bit of a pyramid scheme, really. This is why I've lost so much faith in research publications anymore, because the underbelly is pretty ugly. I've seen this at universities, private labs, even national labs and "think tanks." We really need to reevaluate and restructure how research is performed in the US.
Communication is a two-way street, if your questions are not being understood maybe you should put some effort into making them clearer.
Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries.
Labs that can dangle the carrot of a tenure-track position can pay much less than those that can't; workers overvalue it both because people generally overvalue potential prizes and because it's been gradually made rarer and pushed back further and further.
> Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries.
This would imply that it's impossible for non-academic institutions to offer pensions, too. Now, they are certainly moving in that direction, but it seems strange to argue that they can't.
It would imply that prospective workers don't put a lot of value on private companies' pension plans when weighing employment offers, which in my experience is true (employees do perhaps value governmental workers' pensions, because the government is the kind of stable organisation that can make multi-decade commitments). There's also a level of governmental support (high-profile bailouts and the like) of private pensions that lends credibility to pensions, whereas governments seem if anything anti-tenure.
Do we need more physics research? I guess it depends a lot on how you define physics, but it seems like outside of possibly better silicon nodes, there isn't a whole lot of low hanging fruit in physics at the moment. When physics does get research funding it gets dropped into building giant machines that, at vast expense, have discovered virtually nothing.
It feels like right now most areas of academia are consuming far more resources than their useful output could really justify, which is perhaps why in so many fields it's so heavily dependent on government funding (vs say computer science where academic/corporate lab collaborations are quite common).
It is really hard to predict when research will become valuable- the most valuable US Government grant ever just might turn out to be the NSF/DARPA grants for information science management that funded Brin and Page in their initial work on the PageRank algorithm.
But my favorite example of how research flows into a better world is the Sagnac effect. In 1913, French Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and found interference bands. He thought that this disproved Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier, so 10 points for Einstein.
For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation where ring-laser and fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do.
So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even knew about. But a century later the world depends on it.
In addition to all that's been said about this quote, in my view there can actually be new physics in those precise measurements. For instance astronomical measurements are where you learn if there's something wrong with our accounting of the amount of mass in galaxies, or our understanding of gravity.
Now, I'm not personally likely to discover any new physics, but I'm a physicist, and my bag is precision measurement. And it's a blast. It involves not only physics but also often optics, electronics, mechanics, math, and programming. It's recognized as a branch of physics, and is intensely experiment driven. Among the small handful of people who are crazy enough to be interested in all of those things at once, most are physicists.
Precision measurements are also an area where physics discoveries tend to escape the lab and end up in practical use. When a new effect is announced, I always wonder to myself: "When will they turn that effect into a sensor?" I can think of all kinds of measurements that benefit people, including GPS, atomic clocks, and blood oxygen sensors, that are practically all over the place.
What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry?
There may be a finite amount of works on physics that we can do, or technological niches that we can exploit thanks to discoveries in physics or any relevant field of knowledge.
The well of discoveries isn't running dry today, but it may in future generations.
> What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry?
We have zero idea how gravity works, how to predict the properties of vast stretches of new materials, if the island of stability is real, what the limits to know propulsion technologies are, what the limits to know fusion technologies are, et cetera. And I’m not even getting to batteries or biology or hosts of related fields.
Part of this question is whether there is a limit to human cognition that we can leverage to answer increasingly difficult questions. It isn't whether there are still unanswered questions. So this is truly an issue of diminishing resources and exhausted low hanging fruit. One of those resources is human cognitive ability, relative to difficulty of finding new discoveries.
Just as there are true limits to for example pursuing economic growth from burning finite cheap fossil fuels, "growth" in the forms that pertain to the issue at hand... economic, cheap energy consumption, scientific discoveries, human cognitive ability to solve problems..these can all certainly bump up against at least short term limits, and the issue of cost matters greatly in a given time period because even bringing to bear the actual resource we have to develop new science and technology suffers from crowding out if economic "growth" is constrained because of diminishing cheap energy.
This shouldn't be surprising if one conceives of what consistent and steady compound growth even at small rates results in after a relatively short period of time. Inevitable that limits in many inter related areas will be reached...and either a collapse occurs or a long period of low or negative growth happens with all the sort of conflict that entails (competition within scarcity).
> this is truly an issue of diminishing resources and exhausted low hanging fruit
The fulcrum of disagreement is the power of paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts change how existing knowledge is interpreted, even by a feeble mind. These are, from what we can tell, randomly distributed. There is no indication that we are running out of them. If anything, their rate of discovery is increasing.
Since paradigm shifts are about prospective, not knowledge, there is no reason to believe they are limited. If anything, our growing knowledge base implies the next shifts will be more powerful than the prior ones.
Everyone here is missing the point. It's not that physics is running out of questions to ask. It's that the questions are getting increasingly more expensive to answer, and the answers are increasingly less compelling. The low-hanging fruit picked long ago, modern physics produces fewer discoveries that change people's lives in the way that radar, lasers, microwaves, and transistors did, which makes science investment less compelling to the public.
Remember that from the first public microwave demonstrations in 01895 by Bose to the first deployments (as radar in the 01940s) took 45 years; the Amana Radarange brought microwaves into people's homes in 01967, another 27 years later; and microwave ovens didn't really go mainstream until about 01990, another 23 years after that, 95 years after Bose's first public demonstrations. The LASER was first built in 01960 (following numerous physics advances starting in 01917) but the first mass-market laser product was the CD player, introduced in 01982 and surpassing vinyl records in sales for the first time in 01988, 28 years after Maiman's first LASER.
If anything, the time gap seems to be shortening, but the place to look for "discoveries that change people's lives" is not in basic physics research of today but basic and applied physics of a few decades ago turning into common practice more recently. And in that case there are a lot of examples, especially if we go further afield from just physics discoveries:
- modern LED lighting comes from the physics discovery of how to make stable blue LEDs (though, for reasons of market failure, most LED lights still last only 3000 hours instead of 30,000);
- modern cellphones, computers, GPS, broadband, and in particular broadband wi-fi come from numerous physics discoveries that have enabled chip feature sizes to continue reducing over the last 20 years;
- optoelectronics advances are largely a question of physics, and without even counting blue LEDs, better optoelectronics have over the last 20 years dramatically improved TV screens, computer monitors, cellphone screens, fiber-optic communication, Blu-Ray data storage, and LIDAR for, e.g., self-driving cars;
- the mRNA vaccine for covid, while a biological discovery rather than a physics discovery, was designed within a few day after the genome was published, and seems to have both higher efficacy and less side effects than previous kinds of vaccines (though unfortunately for political reasons it wasn't rolled out for another 9 months, during which tens of millions of people died);
- lithium-ion batteries have gone mainstream, enabling a transition to electric cars and wireless power tools;
- better power electronics, resulting from solid-state physics research, have made induction stoves widespread;
- modern solar panels cost a tenth of what they did a decade ago, in significant part due to physics discoveries over the past 20 years, now account for the majority of new power generation capacity being built, and will probably dramatically drop the cost of energy by 02030;
- due to chemistry discoveries, Spectra/Dyneema fishing line is cheap, strong enough to make bulletproof vests, in fact as strong as the strongest steel, and floats on water;
- superhydrophobic coatings, a physics discovery, are going mainstream now.
Radar, microwaves, transistors, and nuclear physics (which you strangely forgot to mention, even though it's fundamental to modern oncology, and produces a significant part of the electrical power in many countries) resulted from WWII. We've had an atypically low level of great-power wars over the last 75 years, which has been great, but it wouldn't be surprising to have another great-power war in the next decade. If that happens, maybe the survivors will be reduced to sticks and stones, but if not, you can bet that they will have spent a lot on physics research.
Yes, but those new discoveries are less fundamental.
One of the reasons we had such an explosion of new theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century (which gave birth to all the practical discoveries you mentioned) is that, in 1900, there was just so much unexplained weird shit.
Shit like:
1. How do you predict the energy of electrons produced by shining light on a surface? And why does light cause electrons to be produced?
2. Why is the speed of light the same in every direction, to really, really high precision?
3. Why are there spectral bands in the light from stars? And why are they sometimes shifted?
4. Why can current pass only one way through a metal pin poking a semi-insulator?
5. Why does pollen appear to move randomly in the sunlight in still air?
6. Why the fuck is the sky blue? Why does light sometimes act like a way, but sometimes like a particle?
Remember, a lot of this weird shit went unexplained for 25-50-100 years. Then, between 1900 and 1950, smart people came up with theories that explained all the weird shit. So we don't really have so much weird shit anymore because most of it has been explained. Sure, super-conductors are kinda weird, but we also seem to be able to predict a lot of their properties from existing theory.
So, we're really just riding the coat-tails of scientists from 100 years ago. People 100 years from now aren't going to have coat tails to ride.
Less fundamental than transistors? How much less fundamental can you get? There were no transistors floating around in the asteroid belt. Unlike, say, fission reactors, no natural transistor has ever been found.
There's a lot of unexplained weird shit today, too, including the arrow of time, turbulence, dark matter, dark energy, "tuning" of physical constants, solar flares, extreme-energy cosmic rays, ball lightning, the unresolved inconsistency between quantum mechanics and special relativity, structures up to the edge of greatness like the Sloan Wall, the bizarrely low-entropy state the universe began in, and consciousness. Short gamma-ray bursts were finally explained in 02017 thanks to LIGO. (The explanation had been hypothesized previously, but Lucretius correctly hypothesized the explanation for Brownian motion, too, 2080 years ago.) You may be interested in my longer overview in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119.
Your list of 6 weird turds unexplained in 01900 is mostly correct, except that #6 was correctly explained by Rayleigh in terms of Maxwellian electrodynamics in 01881, and Fizeau correctly explained the redshift of stellar spectra in terms of the Doppler effect in 01848, though of course not the spectra themselves. We could add, "Why is the Andromeda Nebula's spectrum so smeared out?" (leading to the Shapley-Curtis Great Debate in 01920), "How can the Earth be older than the Sun?", and "What powers Becquerel's uranium rays?"
While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
The curious thing is that Michelson in 01894 already knew about at least four of your five weird pieces of shit (the Schottky diode had been discovered but was not yet well known), as well as numerous others. In fact, he was personally responsible for discovering #2 in 01887.
So how could even Michelson make such a grievous error, the same error you're making now?
Well, I guess he underestimated the importance of the pieces of shit that were unexplained.
However, I think that error is less understandable today, though, since among the things we know we know virtually nothing about are the nature of 95% of the mass in the universe and the bulk dynamics of plasma, the state of matter in which we see 99% of the remaining 5%.
There's still the question of whose coattails we'll be riding in 100 years, assuming we somehow manage to survive. The Nobel Prize is imperfect and backward-looking by nature, but it suggests Ghez and Gensel for discovering Sagittarius A*, Penrose for black hole robustness, Mayor and Queloz for discovering exoplanets, Peebles for physical cosmology stuff including dark matter, Mourou and Strickland for petawatt lasers by chirped pulse amplification, Ashkin for optical tweezers, Barish and Thorne and Weiss for LIGO, Thouless and Haldane and Kosterlitz for topological order in matter, Kajita and McDonald for neutrino oscillations, Nakamarua and Amano and Akasaki for blue LEDs, and Higgs and Englert for explaining why things have mass. Those coattails doesn't seem obviously worse than the list from the corresponding years 100 years earlier: Guillaume for invar, Stark for spectral line splitting, Planck for quantum physics, Barkla for X-ray spectroscopy, the Braggs and Laue for X-ray diffraction, and Onnes for liquid helium.
But you don't yet know, for example, the significance of optical tweezers for submicron 3-D fabrication, of dark matter for interstellar propulsion, or of topological phase transitions for sustaining life in the Degenerate Era. (Of course I don't know them either; I'm not a time traveler.) NOVA hasn't even made an episode about topological order yet, so you don't yet understand that today's physics advances are fully as important as those of a century ago.
Consider the innovations evident in The Atlantic in November 01921: https://archive.org/details/walpolebeauty00beck. The Victrola (Edison, 01877), tires with anti-skid treads (Dunlop and Continental, 01904), chemical weapons (book review of "The Next War", p. 10; in theory Playfair's cacodyl cyanide, 01854, but more realistically the Hague Convention in 01899, and then massively in 01914), air war, pewter, eugenics, silk lampshades, the electric chair, aeronautics (not yet understood theoretically, so we have to credit the Wrights, 01903), Haldane's metaphysical speculations about "relativity", automobiles (arguably the Oshkosh steam car in 01878, the Flocken Electrowagen in 01888, or the second Marcus car in 01875), motion pictures (Muybridge, 01878, or Anschütz, 01894, or Le Prince, 01886, or Dickson and Edison, 01891-4), thermostats from the Minneapolis Heat Regulator Co. (Drebbel, 01620), clamp-on electric lamps (based on Edison's 1880s designs), personalized pencils with erasers (Lipman, 01858), Smith-Corona portable typewriters ("seniors' theses MUST be typewritten") (Rose, 01906), prenatal clinics, the welfare state ("if we can tax so heavily for purposes of war without raising a protest...", "The taking over by towns and states...of the responsibility for the care and prevention of tuberculosis...meant..."), kindergarten, workmen's comp ("greatly increased demand for safety appliances"), Prohibition, the traction plough, the Panama Canal, "The terrible world-upheaval through which we have just passed...the great war", the resulting inflation of the pound, passports, the SS Imperator, the Bolshevik revolution, the "roar of the city", buses, the League of Nations, and so on.
The crucial thing about this litany is that not one of this astounding list of innovations owes anything to Guillaume, Stark, Planck, Barkla, the Braggs, Laue, or Onnes. Then, even more than now, applied science rode on the coat-tails of basic science from generations before.
Official one yes. Idk about tens of millions but I’m also thinking 5 million is lower than the true numbers. Though I’m also not sure there is a qualitative difference (as much as it pains me to say).
Well, maybe we won't find anything akin to electricity again; the electroweak force is one of the three fundamental interactions we know affect matter in the universe, and knowledge of electricity as such dates back at least to Plato, 2500 years ago. It was unified with magnetism in 01873, and unified with the weak force in the 01970s. Maybe we'll find a fourth one; maybe we won't. (Gravitational waves weren't observed until 02015, and they solved the mystery of short gamma-ray bursts in 02017.) Here's a list of candidates for similarly fundamental discoveries:
1. Maybe we'll find a fourth fundamental force that we just haven't noticed yet. This sounds stupid until you realize that we hadn't noticed Archaea until 01977 or dark matter (85% of matter in the universe) until 01980 (though the phrase is from the 01930s), and we still know almost nothing about the behavior of dark energy, the existence of which wasn't known until 01992.
2. Maybe we'll find a way to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics ("quantum gravity").
3. Maybe quantum computers won't work, demonstrating a flaw in the assumptions of quantum theory in the same way that the Michelson-Morley failure to detect an ether wind demonstrated the flaw in the assumptions of Newtonian physics that Einstein resolved with special relativity. More likely, they will work, and this will change a lot of things; their computational power is still poorly understood. They were originally proposed (by Feynman) as an engine for simulating quantum physics.
4. Maybe dark matter and dark energy don't involve a fourth fundamental force like the strong force, gravity, or the electroweak force, but we still know almost nothing about how they behave. So almost everything about them is unknown. Can we use them for communication, propulsion, computation, energy sources, mass sources, etc.?
5. General relativity hasn't been shown to conserve energy or (equivalently) momentum. Does that mean reactionless drives and perpetual-motion machines are possible, or (more likely) that there's a more subtle symmetry to GR that hasn't yet been discovered?
6. Where does consciousness come from? It's the most perceptually salient phenomenon in the entire universe, but we don't have any convincing account of what it is.
7. We know very little about plasma dynamics. We don't know how to make a usable plasmoid gun, we don't know how ball lightning works (or even if it belongs in this item), and although we know they're a magnetohydrodynamic phenomenon, we don't know how solar prominences are formed, and similarly for solar flares, which accelerate some particles to GeV speeds by means we don't understand at all. We don't know why the solar cycle happens. Coronal waves weren't discovered until 01995. We don't know how to stabilize fusion plasma in a tokamak. We don't know if there are significant magnetohydrodynamic phenomena at scales larger than a star, much less larger than a galaxy. We don't know what heats the corona. This is important because a large majority of the matter in the universe is plasma, and our understanding of it is mostly just empirical, like stamp collecting. We're used to thinking of plasma as an undifferentiated homogeneous continuum like a well-mixed liquid, where nothing interesting happens, quite unlike all our complicated organic molecules (which can't survive in it), but obviously from looking at the sun that isn't the case; we really have no idea about the possible complexities. Is this where the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall comes from? Perhaps more excitingly, if MHD makes stable structures possible in large-scale plasma systems (as it evidently does in the sun), are there analogous phenomena that can occur in a quark-gluon plasma?
8. Forget about magnetohydrodynamics for a moment. We don't even understand regular hydrodynamics. Tao's most famous result (02014) was a finite-time blowup in a version of the Navier-Stokes equation, for which he had to use results from automata theory: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/finite-time-blowup.... What this means in practice remains unclear (Tao: "In principle, it might even be possible in this case that the speed and the wave number both go to infinity in finite time, a scenario known as finite-time blow-up. Of course, such blow-up does not mean that a physical fluid such as water can exhibit this behaviour, but it does mean that the Navier–Stokes equations cease to be an accurate model for such a fluid in these cases."), but it's clear, if Tao's result can be extended to the real Navier-Stokes equations, that it means we don't have an adequate model for fluids in such cases.
9. Okay, and what's up with the profusion of apparently random physical constants? Could they have been different? Are they different elsewhere in the universe?
10. How did the universe start out with such low entropy? Equivalently (or possibly not, depending on the nature of CP violation), why is the past different from the future?
11. Is spacetime continuous, or is it like a sort of foam? Is the foam size really of the Planck-length scale, or is it much larger, as the holographic principle suggests? What happens when you approach that scale? Fundamental particles like protons are far too big to do experiments like this, but in theory we ought to be able to make black holes that are much, much smaller than protons to do these experiments. (You think NIMBY is bad now...)
12. String theory posits a number of other spatial dimensions. Is spacetime really only four-dimensional?
Quite aside from these fundamental problems, any one of which promises a "largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity", there are a huge number of things we can create that don't even require discoveries of fundamental new phenomena like those above. Electrochemistry, to take one of your examples, is extremely underexploited because in most cases we don't know what conditions we have to control in order to make our experiments reproducible, and of course medicine is full of unknowns.
Of course anything could happen in future generations, but there's nothing to suggest that your prediction will happen. Rather the other extreme: the well of discoveries is overflowing today, but may become a geyser in future generations.
Considering the fact that what we don't know is potentially infinite, and what we don't know we don't know is a potentially infinite chunk of that, how could that ever be true? :-)
Well, I guess we could hit a local minima where we need some out-of-this-world resources or research to level up, but let's not be so pessimistic so soon. We've only been doing this modern research thing for a few centuries. You could go back 4-5 generations in an especially long lived family and you'd find someone in the family tree that was still alive before the modern scientific method was created.
I suspected I'd get an answer like this. Please read again: maybe there's not much low hanging fruit at the moment. Invictus0 has it right: this isn't the same thing as "no new discoveries ever".
Fields do have dry periods where for whatever reason, making progress is hard. Most famously AI had its "AI winter" for decades. We know now that there were new discoveries waiting to be made there but they required technology and datasets that simply didn't exist at the time. The last decade of AI progress has depended utterly on the growth of the public internet and then fast GPUs for processing that data. No matter how much funding the government had given symbolic AI in the 80s and 90s it'd have got nowhere. At least not on the use cases people seem to care about.
I find canned answers to this question increasingly tiresome. Academia and government funded research operates on a massive scale. It's unacceptable to me, as one of the people who actually pays for all this, that researchers entirely opt themselves out of any questions of utility or accountability. Fundamental physics in particular should take a good hard look at itself as it's both very expensive and in recent years, delivered very little. Consider string theory. It's been developed since the 1970s. 50 years now and for what? As far as I know this has delivered nothing concrete.
This isn't unique to physics, that's just an example. Epidemiology went down the statistical modelling rabbit hole 20 years ago and never emerged: I've yet to encounter a non-misleading claim coming from this field. If the entire field had been defunded 20 years ago we'd have a much healthier and saner world.
It's also not true that simply labelling something research means it'll one day be useful. Phrenology was once considered to be research. Critical race theory is labelled research. I think we can safely say these fields will never be useful and in fact have had sharply negative utility.
Is this actually the case? There is a lot of research that is occuring in the private sector or research labs and the such. A lot of it is being done at universities, but us there an actual quantified measure if what percentage of research is not in a teaching institution versus what is?
Instead of trying to quantify research (not really measuable in any meaningful sense) perhaps ask yourself how physics has improved your every day life and then ask yourself which improvements you think society should have given up in exchange for a greater supply of quants.
Things like the microchip, wifi, rocketry, satellites, jet engines, etc.
If the answer is "none of it" that tends to suggest underproduction.
This is some rather flawed logic. The productivity of physicists at the time the microchip was invented doesn’t suggest anything at all about the productivity of physicists today, and the utility of productive physics research doesn’t suggest anything at all about the existence of non-productive physics research.
> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries.
It's the American system, frankly.
In Germany research institutes are frequently separated from universities.
> the professions he lists are "lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum.
True, people with zero-sum, "I want more!" attitudes might very well self-select for the listed lines of work, perhaps because of the greater potential payoffs and arguably-weaker checks and balances there. But at the risk of sounding defensive, zero-sumness really does depend greatly on individuals' attitudes: Lawyers can be useful in the same sense that cars' transmissions and oil pumps are useful; MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses; financiers can get people who have money to part with it voluntarily so that others can make use of it.
When I took a review course for the patent bar exam many years ago, Professor Irv Kayton told us forcefully that our job as patent attorneys was not to be scientists or engineers ourselves — we all had science- or engineering backgrounds — but instead to be the "noble servants" of those innovators in society.
In all fairness the legal <=> political feedback loop seems to act to make law less zero sum, by continually increasing the amount of law and regulation, hence an ever-growing pie of legal work.
And all cynicism aside, a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.
> a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers.
I've long thought that; the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions, which would tend to increase (exponentially? factorially?) with population.
> the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions
This is a cultural artifact, not a cross-cultural truth. The historical norm is to use zero lawyers even for the largest-scale transactions. It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
Or use fractional lawyers on one side. All that paper work, and how many use lawyer to check it? Or check when it is forcibly updated...
What should be asked do we have shortage of lawyers? From pricing point of view clearly no, they make more than minimum wage, but in general? Outside court-side is someone struggling to find one? Or are cases waiting cause we do not have them?
> It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
It's great when that happens — and to make it work, there are a couple of conditions that need to be satisfied.
1. All parties to a transaction need to know "the protocol," or "the drill," that is, how to conduct themselves as the transaction proceeds. (Imagine a complicated, multi-person dance where people could crash into each other if they didn't know the steps — or knew the steps but chose not to follow them.)
Competent lawyers can provide the necessary knowledge, but they don't necessarily have to be the sole source of such knowledge: Various industries have developed standardized protocols for different categories of transaction. Examples: the Incoterms [0] and the ISDA Master Agreement [1], to name just two that come immediately to mind.
2. There's another reason parties use lawyers, and contracts, in their transactions: At bottom, companies are just people [2], and people can be perfidious; at some point The Other Side might choose to behave opportunistically. Contracts can help dissuade such behavior. For better or worse, lawyers are one of the principal groups who (might) know how to draft contracts to that end; good lawyers know how to do so without unduly getting in the way of the parties' business.
Consider Alice and Bob, who agree to a contract on behalf of their employers Alpha Corp. and Bravo LLC. Each might be a fine, trustworthy, cooperative individual. But they're human; at some point they might be tempted — or pressured by colleagues — to cheat, or to seek unfair advantage, especially if circumstances were to change. Moreover, one or both of their successors Allen and Betty might be less trustworthy. This means that Alpha and Bravo's contract must guard against opportunistic behavior by one or both of them. Lawyers (can) help to negotiate contracts with appropriate roadblock language.
Again lawyers aren't necessarily the sole source of the necessary knowledge; it just happens to have worked out that they're one of the main sources of it.
Also, lawyers can be useful targets of finger-pointing by business people if a transaction doesn't work out as desired. That can be another, usually-unstated reason why people hire lawyers: To offload at least some of the risk of failure.
[2] In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was pilloried for saying "corporations are people," but in one sense the criticism was unfair: If Romney had said "corporations are just people," his statement would have been far more defensible.
> MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses
I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.
The most important part to our scaling is how we organize ourselves. A top notch organizer allows a group of people to scale seamlessly. That's worth everything in the modern world.
Imagine thousands of brilliant minds, organized elegantly and efficiently to work together at maximum efficiency. It's rare because it's incredibly hard to achieve. But when it does happen, we get so much output, both creative and physical, that it's almost unbelievable. Think Bell Labs & co.
> I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.
I was making a joke; I meant it exactly the way that you put it.
Human efforts can tend to go in different directions. Without foresight, planning, leadership, and communication — MBAs get at least some training in these skills — the individuals within organizations can end up mutually interfering with each other, even when they don't intend to do so. So yeah, MBAs "do have their uses" (another joke).
I agree with everything you wrote and you said it better than I was going to. I just want to add that I actually see "lapsed physicist" as a good sign: in physics PHD grads, we have a lot of people who as part of their formation undertook a focused study on some area at the forefront of human knowledge. Only by doing a lot of these studies will be make real advances, because science is mostly finding things that dont work. And the byproduct is someone with "useful" skills in the sense that they can use them to easily transition to highly paid work, or what the author calls a lapse. Less often, one goes on to a research career, and less often still, one makes a big breakthrough. But overall, it's win-win. Not saying its perfect, but I think having a meaningful offramp after grad school is the best way to do more exploration and push the frontier of science. If you had to do a PHD and then risk complete unemployability after, the situation would be much worse
Alternately, we may be selecting or training those who would be successful through the wrong mechanisms. Those who choose to chase a numerically improbable outcome may not be the most likely to succeed. Tenure commitees weigh a variety of factors including research acumen, teaching ability, office and field politics etc.
Decades of a hypercompetitive market will eventually create entrenched power structures.
> The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum
I disagree with you. From the article, those very professions existing would be explained by Elite Underproduction. It is an example of the system optimizing for all surplus to be competed away. Thus we have created an Elite which include the science and study of competing where only so many resources and only so much status is available.
If you read his argument, it is that we create an "elite" whose role is not to advance the frontier of understanding and achievement, but instead to capitalize on the currently available resources and status.
I think the part that is a little bit of a stretch, is that he's redefining "elite", he seems to say that "elite" should be a status held by those who innovate our capabilities of understanding and producing for all. And then he says, if you take "elite" to mean that, you'll see that we do not produce a lot of those, therefore we are "underproducing elites".
That said, I think generally people think of "elites" more as the "aristocracy", a.k.a, those who have entrenched themselves with social capital and status. With that definition, you can say we produce too many "elites", as in, too many people who are trained in trying to acquire a big slice of the social capital and status, and because there is a limited pool of that, these people fail to acquire a big chunk of it as they all compete for that limited resource. Thus the theory of "Elite overproduction".
So you see, it really just depends how you define "Elite".
But the main point of OPs' article is valid, our system does not reward or invest enough in trying to push our understanding and capabilities in order to advance all of humanity. And because of that, if you have the qualifications to try and do so, you instead choose to capitalize on maximizing your slice of the existing wealth by going into Quants for example, because the system pays well to do that, but doesn't for true research.
Part of the problem with Physics PhDs is they take too long. Median of like 7 years in graduate school. And they’re hyper-specialized, not as useful as the general education you get in physics undergrad.
Good argument for making more undergrad physics students but stopping the emphasis on graduate degrees.
Graduate degrees: 7 years of your young life focusing on a very specific topic that might be better spent applying the really useful physics undergraduate education in industry (or perhaps adding a couple more years in engineering graduate school beforehand).
Not to say that graduate school has no function. But The cost benefit is not nearly as clear as the education you get in undergrad.
I took the author as saying we should have more research positions for those PhDs to inhabit and while we're at it, why don't we let them do that research instead of playing the current academy games that undermine research production.
> The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum.
> standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication"
I think part of the problem with shown with the replication crisis, even though it's less in physics, points to an issue with that being the "standard unit" although. Science, like a lot of the world today, "waste enormous potential, mainly in the causes of legibility and standardization" as the author said. A lot of science busywork is subject to goodharts law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The premise seems wrong in that he disagrees with the elite overproduction thesis, but the professions he lists are " lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. So to me the article really is "I agree with the elite overproduction thesis, I just don't think it applies to physics".
OK lets talk about that then.
If there is something that's gone wrong with pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge it isn't a lack of bodies producing the standard unit of scientific knowledge: "the peer-reviewed publication". These have grown exponentially. I don't think I've seen anyone even argue the rate of knowledge increase is growing commensurately. It *might* be the case that new knowledge requires exponentially more people looking for it but that's a pretty different article. Personally, I'm skeptical more NSF funding would help.
I do agree with this part:
But this research is in a academic setting, and there is definitely, unambiguously, an overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available. Letting more new students in the door wouldn't help anyone!