Thinking about "Science has a problem, and we must talk about it"

I initially was writing this as a response to Backreaction: Science has a problem, and we must talk about it but I thought about it again when reading Backreaction: Don’t ask what science can do for you. Warning, this post contains a bit of biography.

The subject of this post is one that I have thought about for some time. It is also presented clearly in PhD comics PhD: Intellectual Freedom' .

A little bit of biographical context is that I was interested in pursuing fundamental physics theory research when I arrived at graduate school at the University of Maryland in 2002. By late 2004, I had lost interest, not because I had lost interest in the field but because it seemed like the theory side was well provisioned. I was sure that we were going to find supersymmetry (and dark matter) at the LHC, and that that would show us which of the already explored theories was the correct one. It just seemed like there wasn't much that needed to be done until the experimental data was there.

After I short period exploring condensed matter theory, I became an experimentalist. In 2009, with PhD in hand and no intention of staying focused on nuclear physics I joined IceCube and shortly jumped into dark matter searches. From my more mature perspective, it seemed like the theoretical approach was more like a shotgun approach with countless theories posited one of which was surely the correct one.

Now, however, I am less sure. It seems that the theories and models explored often share similarities, the most important being that it is easy to get a publication from that exploration. Theories which are difficult to explore often get ignored. I understand why, if someone needs papers to get a position and papers to get tenure and papers to get grant renewal... why should they do anything else other than study the theory space where they are comfortable and where there is a community? And if the community happens to die for some reason, it is probably easier to join another than to invent a new one.

In 2013 I took my current position in Chile primarily for personal reasons. In the first semester there, before I had a course to teach, I gave a couple of introductory lectures about astrophysics, neutrino physics and nuclear physics. During the neutrino physics lecture, after my presentation of neutrino oscillation, I was asked a question about if the neutrino could interact outside of weak interactions. I thought for a few moments and then said that of course it could also interact with a graviton in a quantum gravity interaction and then it wouldn't appear to oscillate. This formed the beginning of https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ahep/2015/381569/ although I and my collaborator ended up including a lot of other ideas and calculations which had initially been planned for followup papers.

So I returned to fundamental physics theory and I thought I had an ideal setup. I was in a situation where I could, depending on the semester, take care of my experimental, teaching and administration requirements (including frequent applications for grant renewals) with 50-75% (75-90% if I had tenure) of my time and could pursue other interests during the rest of my time. This hasn't always been fundamental physics but science isn't only fundamental physics. And I didn't have to worry about being slow or pursuing something where there is no community.

My personal situation has intruded again and I see failings in my setup. But I think the general point stands: at least grant renewal and probably even tenure should not require 100% or 110% effort but should be pretty much given (at some level) for every productive professor/scientist. This probably means grant amounts will decrease. An alternative of making general grant funding for senior tenured professors, after one or two renewals, depend on working in a new area would probably result in only senior professors at elite institutions getting senior grants which seems to create bad incentives.