My Life with the Physics Dream Team
nautil.us
nautil.us
I did a very "traditional" English-style PhD in Applied Mathematics. I had a supervisor who helped me pick a topic, and gave me just the right amount of supervision. I was under no pressure to publish, and my scholarship did not require me to teach. I spent my days thinking about problems, being frustrated, experiencing small successes, experiencing small failures, managing my time, mismanaging my time, feeling completely inadequate, and slowly becoming an independent researcher.
Yes, my Doctoral studies were undertaken in an ideal situation, supported as I was by friends, my department, my supervisor, and most of all my family, but I can't believe that I am in such a minority.
But do understand that many advisors in engineers and science today are much more demanding than your advisor was. Strong pressure to publish, and sometimes little flexibility in research direction.
Yes, and it’s completely inappropriate for what most people need. It was designed for German academics in the 19th century and it was fine for that. But for any other kind of life, it’s totally wrong. It takes far too long. It forces you to pretend to be a researcher when most people don’t want to be researchers. It’s become a union card and I think it’s highly disruptive, particularly bad for women. For women to waste five or 10 years of their lives is more of a disaster than it is for men."
Anyone with relation to PhD programs care to reflect on this?
It also agree it is very disruptive to family life and I think it not only drives women away from pursuing such a degree - it can in some cases contribute to women having fewer kids than they would like and/or increases the odds of them pursuing expensive fertility treatments later in life.
One of the problems with the PhD system is that individuals have to carve out something that is theirs, they own it. That becomes their dissertation. It doesn't sound terrible said like that, but the most productive work I've ever done was after I graduated and got a job. A small group of people with equal ownership of a problem and solution can be so much more productive. The requirement that a student defend a body of work that is theirs disincentives them from doing, what I think, is the most productive kind of work that leads to the best research outcomes.
You can work in productive groups in grad school, but you still need to find that part of the work that you can claim ownership of. Because if you don't, you won't graduate. This means that inevitably, you're going to have to think in terms of "what do I need to do to get the hell out of here" rather than "what's the best way we can solve this problem."
Funny you mention that. I recently finished my PhD and noticed a posting for a Research Staff Member position in quantum computing at IBM Research, and working on quantum computing research (or fundamental AI research) would be my ideal career. Normally, I submit my résumé and a cover letter to job listings like this, but I've found that it takes a long time to hear back (even when the company ultimately decides to offer me an interview).
As someone who works at IBM yourself and has gone through the process, would you have any tips on improving my chances at being considered as a candidate? I haven't applied yet, but I'm just curious if there's a better route to piquing IBM's interest than submitting a résumé and waiting.
> Because they might have family responsibilities as well?
>> Yes, because there’s a biological clock. It’s ticking much more for them.
For whatever it's worth, I'm mostly happy with the choices I made, including getting a PhD in math. That said, I agree with the sentiment that a traditional PhD is not quite what many (I'm not sure about "most") people need. It makes sense to me to have a parallel system for providing training beyond a master's but isn't a traditional PhD. But working out what such a program would entail requires figuring out a lot of practical details, and it may be some time before such things become commonplace, if ever.
Also, based on the description on Wikipedia, it seems like a D.Eng. is basically like a PhD except that the research problem can be more "applied" (not sure what this means -- it can mean very different things in different fields). In particular, a student still has to pass courses and exams, and in the end work on a piece of individual research as their dissertation.
As for union card: Somewhat true. Varies depending on the discipline.
As another commenter pointed out, though: With the right advisor, institution and topic, there can still be many pluses to make it worthwhile.
Edit: we had one kid before starting the PhD and then another one half way through. Family and PhD is not unmixable. In fact, having a hard limit of 8 hours at the office per day surely helped me be more effective (I was responsible for dropping off and picking up from kindergarten every day).
1) How to do research and run experiments (where you don't already know the answer).
2) How much they actually don't know about a very deep field (and how to study independently).
The extra 4 years of a PhD, as I learned, were to make me an expert in a piece of the field with enough experience writing papers, meeting with colleagues, and designing my own research (not just next-step experiments), and writing funding proposals, that I could teach in the field. Like most others I chose not to become a professor... it's a very competitive and odd position.
Part of the issue is the pressures that have been put on PhD programs. The fight for funding, papers, lab space politics, and relevance seem to have become all consuming as the number of students have grown and positions have remained fixed (filled and tenured). The days when you could follow a reasonable path into academia and Professorship without a lengthy post-doc are gone in most fields at most Universities. Professors have become unhappy managers of giant groups cranking out complex papers based on a huge apparatus (equipment, code, or lab) in order to get tenure and keep their position. CS and Math have a real advantage here as the tools for the job don't usually require as much yearly funding.
Perhaps all this is fine for Particle Physics, but it feels like more and more of the positions at research universities are run this way... and it's not conducive to how many people want to earn their Doctorate... which is often just a badge of honor in the Business world anyway... so maybe we shouldn't try to push so many people through an academic mold so that they can have a different set of letters next to their name.
The entire department showed up to the mathematical physics seminar that week. Everyone besides the math physicists was very disappointed when Dyson gave a talk about some semiconductor crystals he really liked, together with their energy band diagrams. No "meaning of life", no discussion of free will, just a clever math trick for understanding a particular kind of crystal.
It was one of the very few famous guy talks I really enjoyed (the other was Stephen Wolfram).
This is surprising! I always thought old Feynman was a great communicator, but then again, the Feynman he's talking about is a young, determined Feynman, not an old, passive Feynman...
"...we didn’t have anything to learn from [Einstein] and he probably felt the same way about us."
Also, a bit surprising.
"Cooper had this idea that superconductivity had something to do with pairs of electrons and Oppenheimer said that was total rubbish."
Just, wow.
"Biology is moving very fast and so the same kind of people who became physicists in those days now tend to become biologists."
"First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap."
This article is fucking dope and you should read it. Thanks for posting this, dude.
>>First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s impossible to think outside the box. I was in the lucky position of jumping into physics without ever having taken any courses in physics. I’d only been a pure mathematician up to that point.
>Is the great scientist also naturally subversive?
>>Yes, undoubtedly. You’ve got to destroy what exists in order to build something new. You need good taste, of course. If you destroy indiscriminately, it doesn’t help at all. That’s where intuition comes in—what parts of the old building should be taken down.
>Is physics a young person’s game? It seems that most great discoveries are made by people under 40 or even under 30.
>>That is true in theoretical physics. Experimenters can keep going much longer and sometimes stay very productive into old age. That’s a very different game. For theoretical physics, I suppose you need to be ignorant. After a while, you get so attached to things as they are.
I find this pretty fascinating. I was wondering why people who make something really impressive tend to not repeat that, or they basically only make variations on the original. Be they musician, painter, composer, mathematician, scientist, computer scientist, etc. It's not true for all, but it does seem to describe many successful people. Though, they already made one great feat, so it makes sense for there to just be one.
"First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s impossible to think outside the box."
Great article, thanks for posting.
A teacher should be primarily reading research in teaching, with research in the domain as a secondary hobby. Spending an hour filling 15 rolling blackboards with chalk squiggles has long outlived its usefulness and effectiveness.
As a rare example of an inspired researcher and pragmatic theorist of teaching for physics, I would name David Hestenes.
For me, this is the most important piece in the interview (but what a man! As he himself comments to be so lucid as a 90+ year-old famous scientist is very rare).
A recurrent "if I were a rich man" fantasy of mine is to build a platform where people from very different disciplines would come together and discuss open problems in one discipline, something similar to a TED talk but spending 2-3 weeks on one problem. 99.9% of the ideas generated by the non-experts will be BS, but if the remainder is non-zero, it would be worth it.
My money is on both being replaced by something quite completely different. (much like with old Newtonian physics)