The pursuit of Science

I have been thinking about how science works in the modern world again.

Sabine Hossenfelder likes to complain about this; for a recent example, see The Thesis that Killed Academia?. Also see The crisis in physics is real, and Scientific Progress is Slowing Down.

Also, see The End of Science by John Hogan for a related concern that I am not addressing.

Many of my friends also complain about spending so much time chasing grants.

This chase for grants and positions requires publishing lots of papers. This has been driven to new heights due to increased competition. This increase in the number of publications means that it is more difficult for researchers to find valuable information and advances for a given year.

Consider NeurIPS. Almost a decade ago, Microsoft performed a study showing the explosion of papers and citations, Microsoft NeurIPS Study, with 954 publications in 2017. Last year, 2024, the number accepted at NeurIPS Paper Digest is 4500.

While we could consider the claim that the increase is due to increasing advances in science, there is, at the same time, the observation that science is slowing down (see above and Nature Study ).

What is needed is to change the incentives. Publications should be created because someone is interested in the result and not because people need publications for degrees, jobs, and funding. Right now people often choose to pursue research to get funding and not the research that they are most interested in. There is some argument that this is a good thing, that this is a way for science to organize. However, the repeated observations that science is slowing down and the failures in physics suggest that this is no longer a good way to organize. Maybe, like a Machine Learning Algorithm, we are over-training by placing too high of weights on the targets that we have selected, and this is why there are so many publications but so few real advances.

One way to improve things is to increase the randomness. This suggests that a large portion of grants should be selected by lottery. Another approach would be to reduce the number of grants more senior scientists can acquire (a sort of 'early stop'). We can also return to an earlier era, hinted at by Sabine, where research is funded either for results (Department of Defense or Industry) or for passion (like The Templeton Foundation).

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.

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.

The simulation Test

I propose a Simulation Test based on the Simulation Hypothesis. The test is this, is a given purported supernatural event reasonable within the Simulation Hypothesis. Namely, is the purported supernatural event reasonable if you assume we exist in a simulation and the supernatural event was caused directly by the Simulator ‘interfering’ with the simulation.

For example, resurrection can pass the simulation test since it would be easy for the Simulator to take information from one place in the simulation and copy it to another. This type of interference, which is similar in some general sense to feeding the multitudes, is easy to explain and to motivate in our experience with simulations. Healing, where disease leaves the body, would also pass the simulation test as it would be easy for the Simulator to delete certain information through various memory states.

Let’s consider other purported, now considered absurd, supernatural events. Such as lightning strikes. Or the seasons each year. Or rain, however frequent it is. Is it reasonable, even ignoring our natural explanations for such events, for the Simulator to make so many repeated and structured modifications to the simulation? Or would such repeated events be included in a model or routine which is called at many points in the simulation (and so we would probably classify as natural and not supernatural)? So a miraculous hypothesis for such events would not pass the Simulation Test.

For a test to be useful, it needs to be applicable to a current point of discussion (even if one that some people feel is absurd). So let’s consider the interpretation of the biblical story of creation that many Young Earth Creationists hold. In this interpretation, the simulation behaves in a completely different manner in each of what should be called the first seven days and even though the simulation on the seventh day has some surface similarities to the simulation observed now, that it was still fundamentally completely different. Not only that, but that all of those changes were made by interference by the Simulator.

This seems implausible. It might be plausible for the Simulator to start a simulation at an interesting point or to start one simulation, stop it and make fundamental changes to the simulation, and then restart from the point the previous simulation had stopped. But in the Young Earth Creationist interpretation, either that the physics we observe now was the same physics during creation and that the 7 days were defined by continual supernatural events which have no impact on the universe we observe now or that radically different physics exists on each of the 7 days which have no relation to the physics that we observe now or the physics of the previous days, fails the Simulation Test.

Other interpretations of supernatural events in Judaism/Christianity might fail this test. I think the sun standing still for Joshua could be explained by a supernatural event changing the index of refraction and not by the failing interpretation of repeated supernatural events causing the Earth to change its rotation with no other impact other than the change of the Sun's observed movement in the sky.

Change in Science

Reading Sabine’s recent blog posts (physicists still perplexed I ask for and because science matters), and my own experience, has solidified my perception that fundamental physics has a social problem.

I think it comes down to economics, scientists are trained via incentives in the feedback cycle of publish, get positions and grants so that they can continue to publish. It impacts both experimentalists and theorists, and can cause waste in money and effort and, worst of all, true advances can become accidental.

In 2004 I changed from HEP theory because I thought what was needed, in HEP, was experiment. Today, I am more inclined to think that HEP Theory is needed, but not the sort that results in quick publications.

I have a radical suggestion.

Instead of rewarding publications with tenured positions and significant grants, why not return back to the older model where only a few people are tenured with nice positions and large enough grants to hire junior faculty and scientists (postdocs)?

The idea is to try and reward real advances rather than publications. By real advances I mean advances that would end up in an upper level undergraduate text book. This would fix the incentives.

I am not suggesting that we remove tenure or plum positions from anyone. I am suggesting, going forward, that large grants, tenured positions and the invitation to sit on significant decision making bodies should go to those senior scientists who have made significant advances.

The rest should have some continuing position, like untenured Research Professor, until such a time as their work is proven to be valuable. Or move on into Teaching or Industry. And such positions (untenured Research Professor and Teaching Professor) should be paid respectably.

Thoughts on the Simulation Hypothesis

There are books and many blogposts about the Simulation Hypothesis. Some scientists, such as Sabine Hossenfelder and Aron Wall, do not appear to find it very interesting. Some posts by Sabine (do we live in computer simulation and the simulation hypothesis and other and no we probably don't live in computer) influenced my own view on the topic.

While I think that the Simulation Hypothesis is not very interesting scientifically, I think that it is interesting philosophically or religiously (here I think that I disagree with Aron and Sabine). The Simulator is obviously not the God of Classical Theism, but the Simulator can be the Christian God (under some interpretations).

In fact, it is possible for the Simulator can have all of what I consider to be the most important qualities of the Christian God: being the source of existence of everything that we interact with, having a desire to have a personal relationship with us, having the ability to create change within us, being good, being one and having the ability to hear our prayer.

Also, we already have examples with our own simple simulations of simulation creators placing themselves in their simulation, so the notion of the Simulator having a presence in the Simulation (Jesus) is not difficult. Finally, resurrection would be simple for the Simulator as it would just be changing a few 'memory states' in the Simulation.

So while I claim that the God I worship, the Christian God, is the God of Classical Theism and so do not desire for the Simulation Hypothesis to be true, believing in it does seem to me to be just another way of saying "I believe in god(s)" and it can even be another way to say "I believe in the Christian God".

Evolution of Humans

I read How humans tamed themselves with interest and I have not read the related scientific article(s). But the obvious thing that came to mind, as a parent, is that there is an another obvious hypothesis.

We were tamed by being parents. Our children do not take 6 months or 1 year or even 3 years for basic functionality and not the level of functionality needed to care for themselves until they are somewhere near 12 years old. Orangutans are usually cared for until they are about 6 years so that is pretty long.

When you are caring for someone, and it requires a group not just one person, then you have to put aside violence and work together. And (less domestic) individuals who don't do that, would end up being less successful, and be less likely to have children.