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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little disappointed that the article didn't address the obvious question.

If he didn't publish any papers after that, what did he actually do?

The entire article actually seems to undermine his point.

He was a professor of physics at Edinburgh University, and he certainly showed up on the campus there. I saw him around, but I don't recall witnessing him doing any work since I didn't study much physics.

I'm guessing what he did was teach classes and supervise graduate students, put out the occasional paper now and again, just like any other professor. Also, his name would allow Edinburgh University to say 'We have that famous Professor Higgs working for OUR Physics department' to any passing Science Funding Authority or Corporate R&D department thinking of handing out a research grant in physics, or to any rich foreign parents looking for somewhere to send their physics-inclined offspring.

I'm sure he was pretty good value for money just for his name alone...

>I'm sure he was pretty good value for money just for his name alone... //

That may be true but it's such a sad indictment of how science funding works if it is true that I sincerely hope it isn't.

A professor of physics's value is in research and teaching, it's their capacities and abilities that make them valuable as physicists.

Who let the marketeers take over management of scientific progress??

This will not answer your question, but at the end of his CV here, there is his list of publications.

http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs

aha! just as I suspected... during 1951-1964, he published 16 papers, better than one per year. But, after his breakthrough, he eased back to 9, over 1965-2013... and only the first 3 look to be research papers (the remaining 6 seem to be historical recountings).

Now, I don't blame him - do something incredible, why not slack off? He's way more accomplished than I could ever hope to be.

But if you want an exemplar of doing great work, the pace before his breakthrough, leading up to it, seems the better guide. i.e. one per year.

Why is it slacking off? Is it instead not normal for scientists to publish 3 papers over ~40 years? How do we know whether or not this is normal or abnormal?

I'm inclined to believe we don't. And that we only assume so because of the incentive structures in place in our grant-first, publish-always system.

Even 3 papers per year would be below average nowadays.

Nowadays his 'prime year' 1 paper per year would be considered an unacceptably low rate and result in him being thrown off long before his breakthrough.

…published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

What are you talking about?

He is asking why only 10 papers in 40+ years. What else was taking up his time? I have the same question.

Presumably thinking about things that never resulted in papers because they didn't work out, or else working on those 10. Working for 4 years on a paper isn't out of the question if it's totally original work and one is being super careful. Not that doing that is rewarded these days, which I assume was exactly his point.

Even for those of us just learning, far more "productivity" is required. If I wrote a paper every 4 years, my PhD program would be a 10-14 year program.

That's exactly his point.

Besides, once upon a time, you could get a PhD for a single paper. It's just that they are a dime a dozen these days.

honestly, what is "a paper"? a publication is an atrifact of an idea. says nothing about the quality of that idea. today's system is just geared toward printing out a lot of garbage. one way to understand this is that all subjects have similarly increased publications over the years. does that mean each subject is progressing as a function of the subject's publications? of course not. they are being told to "jump" for money, so those in academy respond: "how high"? Acdemics are truly just rats in a maze at this stage of the game. They are guaranteed a salary by tenure, but not "funding" to actually do their work. Tenure offers no job security, in the broader sense, of having your costs covered.

"didn't"… "any" implies none. And wouldn't one be better off being concerned with what is taking up their own time? Higgs probably won't have the same question for you or me…

Generally yes, but if someone, Higgs in this case, is saying there is something broken with academia's definition of productivity then it begs the question what should that definition be? What was Higgs doing that was more important or more productive than publishing papers? It is a totally fair question given the circumstances.

Had Higgs never said anything then I wouldn't be interested in how he spent his time in the office. Nor would it be appropriate to care.

So you're saying because of his experiences with academia and the status he has from his hard work, he needs to help set new goal posts for the masses to pigeon hole themselves into which could resemble the situation in which he says we have today? It is a fair question if you don't expect any answers from him, but from the question itself, it doesn't seem that way. It seems like a question that would be more apt for the self.

I think the question was simply, "what was the standard he was measuring himself by, by which he considers himself to be successful?" It doesn't have to be a yardstick applied to anyone else--but presuming that Higgs doesn't believe himself to have wasted his life after the publication of his famous works, I wonder what he thinks makes that true.

Asking for definitions of what people should do, when ultimately the individual will be the one who will have a choice to make regardless of the circumstances, seems like yardsticking to me (that's what definitions are used for, right?), though I suppose I could wonder about that too.

I also suppose I could wonder about how many aspiring/(non)tenured PHD's spend their entire lives producing publication after publication without an inkling of fame or any major contributions relative to those of the likes of Higgs (or in general, anything any individual decides to do in the spectrum of their peers), who think that they haven't wasted their life.

Actually, it raises the question, it does not "beg the question".

https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html

Not a physicist, but writing one good paper every four years sounds like a very good thing. Would you rather read 40 papers, each of which is a lowest-publishable-unit, or 10 which noticeably move science ahead?

Because of his fame, Higgs had the luxury few do--- he could contemplate quietly, and people wouldn't dare say he was doing nothing. If you do that as a mere tenure-track professor, I'd figure the university would think you're too high risk and sack you.

>Would you rather read 40 papers //

That would depend on whether the atom of scientific knowledge in one of those many published papers was what was needed to progress another's/one's own work or not.

I'm not suggesting quantity and regularity are better - I don't think you can force scientific progress to adopt a given release schedule - but neither am I happy to say that publicly funded results should be sat on pending a larger breakthrough.

"What else was taking up his time?"

Critical listening to others, building and being part of a community of practice, developing and challenging research students. Possibly informal communication, although I'm not sure of that. Teaching.

Basically dialogue rather than written papers.

Downvoters: please specify your knowledge and experience in academic research. I know what mine is.

who cares? you get tenure for what you did, not for what you're going to do.

... and for the promise of continued production.

Yes but you don't necessarily lose tenure if you don't publish, no? So realistically the promise isn't that important if you don't really suffer from failing to keep it.

Promise as in showing the potential for future research, not for your promising to do future research.

But yes, it is a gamble, that often fails. But people aren't given tenture just because of what they've done in the past. Yes, it relies on what they've done in the past, but the intent is that past behavior is a predictor of future behavior.

Sure, but haven't you just made his?

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