Physicist Fotini Markopoulou traded quantum gravity for industrial design
nautil.us
nautil.us
The Seers-Craftspeople problem is not unlike the innovator's dilemma and the big-corp/startup. The Perimeter, of all places, was about fostering Seers. Einstein is the canonical Seer, and it is generally accepted that Einstein today would have been, at the beginning of his career, even less welcomed by the scientific community (before his 1905 papers, he was unable to secure several faculty positions, etc, went to work in the patent office).
Maybe Milner/Zuck can come up with something to help fund the Seers, à la startup incubator, thinking long-term, in the sense that 1 successful unicorn in a portfolio of 100 would be worth it, and you could have 15+ years to think without any pressure to publish.
Apparently the odds of finding some at the Perimeter have diminished in the last few years.
Maybe YC/Thiel/Musk want to take up this challenge, à la OpenAI.
Maybe hope lies in guaranteed basic income. (À la Buchheit: "we don't need more jobs, we need more Steve Jobs.")
[1] Smolin, Lee - The Trouble with Physics, Chapter 18 "Seers and Craftspeople"
"Master craftspeople and seers come to science for different reasons. Master craftspeople go into science because, for the most part, they have discovered in school that they’re good at it. They are usually the best students in their math and physics classes from junior high school all the way up to graduate school, where they finally meet their peers. They have always been able to solve math problems faster and more accurately than their classmates, so problem solving is what they tend to value in other scientists.
Seers are very different. They are dreamers. They go into science because they have questions about the nature of existence that their schoolbooks don’t answer. If they weren’t scientists, they might be artists or writers or they might end up in divinity school. It is only to be expected that members of these two groups misunderstand and mistrust each other.
[...]
Of course, some people are mixtures of both. No one makes it through graduate school who is not highly competent on the technical side. But the majority of theoretical physicists I know fall into one or the other group."
"It is easy to list those whose thinking has led to papers and even books addressing foundational issues: Roger Penrose is perhaps the best known to the public, but one can name many others including John Baez, Louis Crane, Bryce DeWitt, Fay Dowker, Christopher Isham, Fotini Markopoulou, Carlo Rovelli, Rafael Sorkin, and Gerard ’t Hooft."
It shouldn't be a big deal when someone decides to step back from working on abstract algebraic models of highly constrained physical systems (Feynman's "creativity in a straightjacket") to working on the more human task of design.
Design is fascinating, but it's all about putting yourself in someone else's shoes. What does the user want? Why should the user have to do X at this point? It's different and it exercises different parts of the mind from theoretical physics. It's a lot more natural for humans.
Cryptographic protocol design is IMO the closest thing in CS to product/service design in the corporate/engineering world. There you have formal proofs and formal breaches in security, but everything hinges on implicatures and difficult-to-formalise expectations of what the protocol is intended to achieve.
The architect Zaha Hadid apparently studied math at university before switching to architecture. She's a controversial figure (also a woman) and her architectural achievements were absolutely from an imaginative rather than a mechanical part of her personality.
As for "Seers and Craftspeople", if you replace those words with "Visionaries" and "Mechanics", you're in danger of reproducing the already widespread prejudices in Western society about intelligence and human worth. It starts to sound like normative vs positive, prescriptive vs descriptive, which is, like all binaries, a bit divisive.
I'll have to read that book.
I am totally convinced this is the way to go. If you look into successful people and organisations like Alfred Sanger, Cold Spring Harbor or Bell Labs they operated like this. There's no other way to implement Hamming's You and Your Research advice. Small groups, no middle management, no short-term goals, no paper optimization!
I do research at a world class university. Previously I was in pretty decent ones ranking in the bottom top #100. They all have the same issues. It is very frustrating. If YC/Thiel/Musk decided to fund OpenX (for X in Bio, Renewables and a few others) the world would be a much better place in 50 years time. I have lost my faith in universities as an applied research place.
Doron Zeilberger has written about this aswell:
""" The usual names are "theory-builders" vs. "problem-solvers", but these two protoypes of mathematicians also appear under various other appellations. Some other names are strategists vs. tacticians, "monkeys that climb up the tree" vs. "monkeys that climb down", globalists vs. localists, and folowing א ח ד ה ע ם, I once called them prophets vs. priests. """ [1]
> something to help fund the Seers, à la startup incubator
The problem with this is that the Seers tend to sound like crazy people (and alot of them probably are just nuts). Especially to a craftperson, they really struggle to follow the seer. John Baez is a good example of someone who can balance the Seer with the craft, but i've noticed he will team up with someone who is more seer than he is to get those really good ideas.
Ah, alright. I was wondering what she was wearing.
(is your sarcasm detector working?)
'He [Turok] didn’t want the institute, he says, “to be center for alternative physicists who were doing unusual things in speculative directions.”'
you know something has gone wrong somewhere.
Because when you have no idea how to get to quantum gravity, shutting down "unusual things in speculative direction" is pretty much guaranteed to leave you with nothing.
> I applauded her for her bravery for pursuing her own line, but that inevitably brings risks with it. She is a very fundamental thinker; she had original ideas. But at the end of the day you had to decide if those ideas are going to pan out
Why not let the broader community of scientist decide this?
And a huge gain for everyone else?
You can imagine an alternate system where you poll the larger community, but this is liable to degenerate into a popularity contest as each voter spends a tiny amount of time choosing people with whom they are not familiar. In contrast, the tenure committee is able to invest more time looking carefully at a single candidate.
Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!?
If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place.
I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment.
Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Scie...
Edit: made my statement less sloppy
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150130-joint-dust-analysis-...
The problem of quantum gravity, which the Perimeter Institute was originally set up to tackle, is as foundational theoretical work as you get. Yet Another Cosmological Model is not. The latter is several layers of "less foundational" further up. It has nothing to do with quantum gravity. (Neither does the article you linked; I have no idea what you're trying to say with that reference.)
You ask "why else is Turok considered more credible". More credible than what? If you mean as an expert on quantum gravity, he is not; AFAIK he has never even worked on the subject. That's the point. His appointment as director signaled a complete change of direction for the Perimeter Institute.
If she had developed other lines of work so that people would scratch her back.....if you're looking at it from a faculty hiring point of view you're usually going to favor the person who "plays nice with others". Hans Bethe saved Ken Wilson's bacon at Cornell for years, until Wilson got the Nobel Prize. Peter Higgs almost got fired at Edinburgh. Gell-Mann protected John Schwarz at Caltech, etc, etc. She had no political cover.
> She is fine-featured and striking. Her heavy-lidded eyes anchor a gaze that seems wary of its own powers, as if her promiscuous intelligence must hold itself back from latching on to your every word. She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales.