Science and Scientists

 I left academia back in 2019 to become a research scientist at Onto Innovation. My title was research scientist, but was I still a scientist?

I read papers and thought up approaches using machine learning and the theory of machine learning to solve problems in semiconductor metrology (primarily for optical critical dimension (OCD) and a little X-ray critical dimension (XCD) metrology). I also worked on simulation. I mostly did applied research, looking to put ideas together from papers that could be used for OCD.

However, my work's results were primary trade secrets. Some were turned into preliminary patents, and some were handed off to engineers to be put into products. However, none of my results were communicated to other scientists. This was true even internally. I made presentations, but the other research scientists at Onto Innovation were not interested unless they were relevant to their work at the time. I did not go to conferences.

And I felt frustrated.

In January of 2022, I left to focus on Euler Scientific. Our main project was research, with a strong (maybe too strong) basic research component. But since our main customer was the Department of Defense, and because our main goal was to produce an application (the basic research was supposed to turn into applied research and then into an alpha application), and to have a successful company (and so more customers), there was no discussion outside of the limited number of involved scientists (really only myself and two with minimal time commitment from Fermi National Laboratory) and I didn't attend any conferences. There was an agreement to write papers, but without dedicated time/effort, they have been slow (there are two that are in the editing process (one that needs to be re-edited for submission to another journal and one that needs to be submitted for the first time) and two more that are almost finished and an additional one that requires more work). 

Was I still a scientist?

I spent the last 8 months focused on finding new employment. Despite funds being limited, I attended a conference I was invited to: Erice International School on Complexity: the XVIII Course "Machine Learning approaches for complexity". I realized there what I had been missing. Since the fall of 2017 (when I took parental leave, which became a parental leave sabbatical in the spring of 2018 which continued until I left academia in 2019) I had not communicated my research with other scientists (non-collaborators). Science can not be done alone; it must be communicated. This was what I had been missing.

I am not sure if I will still be a scientist in my next career step. I think that being a scientist outside of laboratories and academia is a privilege and one that I can not maintain. I look forward to bringing my work to customers, and my title will be engineer.

Physics heroes, classes and graduate school

I wrote most of this five years ago but didn't publish it because I was still thinking about it. I am sharing it now, including my original opinions, despite my opinions changing. My new opinions are given in the last three paragraphs.

Over the years, I have thought about physics heroes. A lot of people love Feynman, and while I enjoyed his autobiography and had a professor I TAed for compare me to him, I didn't really consider him my hero. The same with many other physicists. I think that Einstein and Newton were my heroes as I started to pursue physics, but over the last 15 years, I have discovered that I consider Freeman Dyson a hero, and I have since read several of his books. While I understand the point of how heroes hurt science, I also think that they can do a lot of good. And not just by providing inspirational role models like Jim Gates.

When I was a freshman, Freeman Dyson visited my college. He taught a class for non-majors and gave a couple of lectures for the physics students. One I attended had several of us, including Dyson, leave the lecture hall to go to the theater and watch the Matrix. One thing he said at the time stuck with me, at least the concept (since the words didn’t). That was that physics was something you do and not what you study, that you needed to get involved in research and not just take classes.

I didn’t truly understand and internalize this idea until I almost dropped out of my third year of graduate school. It has become one of my guiding philosophies as a physicist and physics professor. 

I have observed that online graduate degrees are popular (universities withstood moocs but risk being outwitted by opms). I don’t see the point of them. Even a non-lab undergraduate degree loses out on a lot of value being online only, and graduate degrees lose out on most of their value. I think a good undergraduate degree should be 70-80% coursework, a master's degree should be 30-50% coursework, and a PhD should be around 10% coursework. The non-coursework component can be done with industrial mentors instead of academic mentors, but the good mentors will generally be at the same location as the good academic mentors. Who will do the legwork, and how is that legwork going to be valid for industrial mentors in a location without academic mentors?

I think the real signal with these online graduate degrees is that new things have been learned. But that isn’t the purpose of a graduate degree.

Since I graduated with my PhD, I have continually learned new things and worked in new fields. I have never taken a course, just reading papers (and books sometimes) to understand where the field is or to find a good technique. I think that instead of doing this, many people are taking a Master's degree (and spending money on it). They do get a certificate that others can see, but they don’t get the deep knowledge that traditionally comes from a Master's (or PhD).

This opinion of mine has changed.

In the last 8 months I have searched for a new position in industry. The requirements for finding a software engineering adjacent position have changed since I left academia for industry in 2019. I did not get the interviews I expected and ran into rounds of coding assessments that were well beyond my level (especially 8 months ago when I received my first interview at a top AI startup).

I didn't pursue an online graduate degree, but if I had the funds to do so, I would have done so, and it would have benefitted me. Both as a signal for the recruiters and hiring managers and because, while I have self-studied and learned a lot and have been following free online self-study courses (without reputable certificates) like those found at CodeSignal and NeetCode, it would have been beneficial to have the direction of a professor.

So, my position on this has changed because I think the signal is important and valuable. I may still never do an online Master's. But if I had had the assets to do one in the last year, I would have done one. And it would have been beneficial for me.

Entrepreneurship

 For most of the past three years, I have been engaged in a new adventure: trying to start a company. I was not, and am not, a natural for this endeavor as I am a scientist and not business-minded.

I left my former employer, Onto Innovation, in January 2022 to lead Euler Scientific and its efforts, primarily to develop a toolbox to enable the interpretability of neural networks, including a bound on the generalization error (or the difference between the neural network's prediction on the training data and the prediction on some unseen test dataset).

In 2023, we attempted to pivot, and in the winter of 2023, I shifted to focus on finding new employment (after releasing an alpha toolbox). Finally, in the summer of 2024, I have found a new position.

Looking back at my time as an entrepreneur, I really needed to be more customer-focused in 2022. I was focused on solving technical problems, which were great and required me to solve them, but I also needed to be focused on customers. Doing both required more time than I had available.

The other thing I needed, which I also really needed to find new positions (and to find positions in the past), is a good network. Most entrepreneurs, especially those focused on business-to-business sales, use their network to find their customers. My network is too international and academic to be useful in finding business-to-business sales.

Being an entrepreneur at this time is not right for me. Before I consider stepping out into entrepreneurship again, I think that I need to have a large network, not just ideas and technical ability (and even investors), to serve as a seed for business-to-business sales.

Bias in life and physics (sexism)

My thesis advisor (Prof. Betsy Beise) was a woman physicist, as were both of my postdoctoral supervisors  (Prof. Olga Botner and Prof. Catherine De Clercq), as was one of the co-leaders of my primary experiment as a professor in Chile (Prof. Debbie Harris). Despite this, and the progress it represents, I think that there is a bias that women face and not just societal imbalances relating to parental leave, parental responsibilities and expectations.

My experience in physics is that a bias exists. I have heard numerous male physicists express in private that women physicists were good or acceptable as lecturers, colleagues and even administrators but not as thought leaders or researchers. This wasn't just from elderly physicists, but also from ones from my generation.

Also, being an active and involved father of two young girls has opened my eyes to some of the bias that exists in this world and in myself. My girls always want the story to be about girls or assume that anyone not given a gender is a girl. My observation is that many of the stories give a male gender for the character (unnecessarily) and my own bias comes through in my discussion of stories without explicit gender where I tend to give characters a male gender if an explicit female gender is not given.

It is clear that an explicit effort to attract female talent to physics is necessary and appreciate those such as Prof. Kim (University of Chicago) who do this. Also necessary is a societal rebalancing towards parenting which has started in Sweden (and other places in Europe) and which some in the United States would like to implement here. Part of this rebalancing must include a rebalancing of expectations and responsibilities, like in Sweden, where men have parental leave.

I think a step that hasn't been made anywhere is to make some minimal amount of parental leave (6 months) required.

Church

For many people the community aspects of religion are crucial. In fact, I know plenty of Christians for whom the community aspect is the main and most important part of Christianity. By community aspect I mean by going to church an individual is part of the community and has friends/support networks/etc and so on.

For most of my life this community or body aspect of church was foreign to me, despite attending weekly.

Growing up, I didn’t make friends at church, I didn’t really talk to others. I would go and listen to the sermon or sleep or think about games/books. I would sometimes take part in religious discussions there, even on occasion being a very active participant, but that was all.

When I returned to church (not Christianity, I never left Christianity) in the middle of graduate school, I began to appreciate three more components. The first of these was worship, was singing and praising as the body of Christ. The second was being inspired, as I came to very much appreciate pastors who could inspire me for the coming week to work to improve my life for the better. The final, and relatively illformed for me compared to the first two, was service. I didn’t lead or play a significant role in service to the community, but I did occasionally play a bit role and I found that that was also important and valuable component of church. I also found a camaraderie in service.

But I still struggled with the community aspect. Part of this is just a fundamental difficulty with socializing that I also find with physics conferences and the like, and my behavior at receptions is often similar. But at church I would take part or leave. Sometimes I tried to force myself to become part of the community by staying but I would just stand in a corner awkwardly. Sometimes I would have in mind to go greet someone, but that would be over quickly and then what? So the community aspect of church was foreign to me.

The last couple of years I began to understand, to internalize, it a bit more. For the first time, that became the most significant component (at times) to me of church and not worship or inspiration or it being a set aside time to rest. This was because I had children, and involved them in the children’s programs. They loved being involved with the other kids and I followed them.

So now, for the first time and as we can no longer worship together in person, I find myself wanting the community part of church.

The Economist (the virus is accelerating dechurching in america) posited that people would find other sources for what they got from religion after going away. I have also heard concerns about this from pastors who I know and admire.

It is true that the habit has been broken. But inspiration and praise are available remotely and online, and all forms of community, not just religious community, are missing at this time. People need community (especially those with families) and will return to them or renew them when they are able to.

So no, I don't think that the there is going to be a significant increase in dechurching, beyond that which has been going on the last two decades and at least partially originates in the alliance between evangelical christianity and the Right in the United States.

Chilean Unrest

Despite the proximity between my resignation and the social unrest in Chile, the social unrest had nothing to do with my departure. I permanently left Chile in 2018 and not in 2019. The connection is that the social unrest is due to the lack of opportunity, which is one of the reasons for my departure (my family left Chile in 2015, partially due to a lack of opportunity).

While the social unrest appears to be extremely costly, I hope that the structural changes needed will come about and Chile will be in a better place in a decade than it otherwise would have been. There is a constitution vote in April, which is an opportunity for improvement and for a more socially cohesive future.

While my place in the development of human and intellectual capital was at the top (I primarily worked with PhD students), my observation is that Chile’s education system needed an overhaul from the ground up. While I was not an expert at this, I was told that the problems were intrinsic and in the Chilean constitution. 

It seems that the problem with education is similar to what has become a problem in places in the US, where the money and wealthy students go to private schools which provide barriers to the majority and bring the overall level of education down by reducing competition between the wealthy and upper middle class and the majority of the population. In this way it is a disservice to both the upper classes and the masses and the country as a whole.

I observed this was a problem, but because I wanted my kids to compete internationally, if we had stayed in Chile my daughters would have gone to expensive private schools. It is hard to cause the required change without mass action, which is done by government, and in education the current Chilean constitution does not allow this.

It is interesting that in the Economist Ranking, Chile recently moved up to Full Democracy and the US recently moved down to Flawed Democracy (Economist: Global Democracy).

Further information on education in Chile (OECD Summary 2018  ODI Chilean Education).

Editorial from the Times on the protests (NY Times Opinion Chilean Protests).

The Chilean constitution (in English) (Chilean 2012 Constitution).

Change

After a decade working as an experimentalist, first as a postdoc and an astrophysicist in Sweden and Belgium and then as junior faculty and a neutrino physicist in Chile, it looks like I am moving on to other things.

I am proud of the physics measurements that I have contributed to.

This decade has been enabled by many scientists: Betsy Beise, Bogdan Wojtsekhowski, Olga Botner, Allan Hallgren, Carlos de los Heros, Catherine De Clercq, Roman Pasechnik, Will Brooks, Ivan Schmidt, Claudio Dib, Gabriel Perdue, Diego Aristizabal, and Pedro Ochoa.

It has very much been enabled by my long-suffering family.

Graduate school

When I was a freshman, Freeman Dyson visited my college. He taught a class for non-majors and gave a couple of lectures for the physics students. One that I attended had a number of us, including Dyson, leave the lecture hall to go to the theater and watch the Matrix. One thing he said at the time stuck with me, at least the concept (since the words didn’t). That was that physics was something you do and not what you study, that you needed to get involved in research and not just take classes.

I didn’t truly understand this idea and internalize it until I almost dropped out of my third year of graduate school. It has become one of my guiding philosophies as a physicist and physics professor. 

I have observed that online graduate degrees are popular (universities withstood moocs but risk being outwitted by opms). I don’t see the point of them. Even a non-lab undergraduate degree loses out on a lot of value being online only and graduate degrees lose out on most of their value. I think that a good undergraduate degree should be 70-80% course work, a masters degree should be 30-50% coursework and a PhD should be around 10% coursework. The non-coursework component can be done with industrial mentors instead of academic mentors, but the good mentors will generally be at the same location as the good academic mentors. Who is going to do the legwork, and how is that legwork going to be valid, for industrial mentors in a location without the academic mentors?

I think the real signal with these online graduate degrees provide is that new things have been learned. But that isn’t the purpose of a graduate degree.

Since I graduated with my PhD, I have continually learned new things and worked in new fields. I have never taken a course, just reading papers (and books sometimes) to understand where the field is or to find a good technique. I think that instead of doing this that many people are taking a Masters (and spending money on it). They do get a certificate that others can see, but they don’t get the deep knowledge that traditionally comes from a Masters (or PhD).

Psalm of Daniel

This year my church has had a sermon series on Daniel. I decided to reread it, perhaps for the first time in over a decade, and while I didn't get past chapter 7 or so I was initially struck by the praise in Daniel 2. Daniel was a wiseman, one of the educated of his time and in some way the middle eastern antecedent of a scientist, and he praised God for the knowledge that was bestowed on him.

NRSV (Daniel 2:20-23)

“Blessed be the name of God from age to age,
    for wisdom and power are his.
21 He changes times and seasons,
    deposes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
    and knowledge to those who have understanding.
22 He reveals deep and hidden things;
    he knows what is in the darkness,
    and light dwells with him.
23 To you, O God of my ancestors,
    I give thanks and praise,
for you have given me wisdom and power,
    and have now revealed to me what we asked of you,
    for you have revealed to us what the king ordered.”

As I have sought knowledge and understanding as a scientist, I have prayed for insight (and occasionally even for wisdom). I feel that in some small measure that I have been given some. I think it is important, as a scientist and a Christian, to acknowledge God's place in my seeking and appreciate finding in Daniel a biblical model to identify with.

Other Blogs

Sometimes you come across someone that has not only done what you wanted to do, but also has succeeded far more in every way. I realized that it was the case for me when I came across Aron Wall's blog a couple of years ago.

I strongly recommend his blog, named UNDIVIDED LOOKING.
Before that, I came across a nice presentation of his about the Fine Tuning argument for the existence of God.

He is a much more successful physicist, a particle theorist (which was my original interest), regularly updates his blog and blogs about Christianity and Physics. We even had some overlap at the University of Maryland, but I think that we didn't meet as I spent most of my time at Jefferson Laboratory starting in January of 2006.

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.

Physicists on God and Science

The following is based on my recollection, I am sure that details are wrong and the statements "quoted" are a paraphrase of my memory. 

In 2004, I and some UMD graduate students interested in studying particle physics theory attended a series of lectures by Prof. Gates. A group of interested undergraduates from Howard also attended.

One day, I and the other graduate students had spent some time talking about the Anthropic Principle. This continued as we went to the lecture. Gates had something come up and so it continued as the Howard students also arrived. 

Gates ended up very delayed and so the discussion developed into a more general God and Science discussion with ~3 sides: I and a Jewish graduate student taking a general theist perspective, the other graduate students taking a general atheist perspective and most of the Howard students taking a traditional Christian perspective.

The discussion had continued for over half an hour and had become very involved when Gates arrived. He listened for a few moments and then drew a Venn diagram with three circles and labeled them Technology, Mathematics and Nature. He pointed to the intersect of all three and said something like
“This is the part of the universe that we have the technology to make measurements of and the mathematics to describe. This is where we do science.”
He then pointed to the part of the circle that was exclusively Nature and said something like
“I believe that God is here”
and then pointed to the overlap of Nature and Mathematics
“and that String Theory is here, where we have mathematics to describe nature but do not yet have the technology to make measurements yet.”
He then went into his lecture.

This didn’t seem to have a very strong impact me at the time, but retrospectively has had a huge impact on me. I think about his diagram whenever I think about God and Science or Religion and Science and associated issues.

The view

I have been inspired by many other great blogs to create one of my own. As a physicist, and a christian, I have views which I would like to express and which are not expressed in other popular blogs. I am not a giant, but may stand on their shoulders. I don't intend this blog primarily as a vehicle of my own ideas, but rather as a place to respond to the ideas of others. Nevertheless, I do intend to use this blog as a component of my scientific outreach.

In particular I take inspiration from Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal where Miles Kimball posts primarily about economics, but also about religion, science and humanities. Additionally, he has guest bloggers whose posts are sometimes even more thought provoking than his. I hope that I also will be joined by friends here, especially on areas where I am less knowledgable such as sciences outside of physics, philosophy, mathematics and religion.

As for me, I am an american, liberal (in politics), christian, experimental physicist. As a freshman student I had the fortune of meeting Freeman Dyson. He gave great advice (in essence that physics is something you do, not something you study) which I did not heed. It was only after I determined that high energy physics theory was not for me, and that what was needed to advance our understanding of the fundamental workings of the universe was experiment, that I really started engaging in research. This was done by first probing nucleons (with electrons) at Jefferson Laboratory and then by looking for signatures of dark matter as member of IceCube at universities in Sweden and Belgium, and now, here in Chile, by once more probing nucleons (this time with neutrinos at Fermilab) and initiating future neutrino experimental programs.

I expect to write at least two posts per week with at least one post about science and mathematics and at least one post about philosophy and religion.

Read Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal at
blog.supplysideliberal.com