It has turned ungodly hot and humid. Traveling outdoors feels like walking under water. The humidity exerts a pressure, and wastes your will to move. I mowed the lawn as fast as I could at 9am this morning, and was drenched with sweat in ten minutes. This is a good place to be a plant.

Days like this our 1970’s vintage air conditioner never turns off. I’m thinking it might be worth a home-equity loan to get a new model. It might pay for itself in a few years.

It appears UPS has lost my laptop.

From Lee Smolins “No New Einstein” in Physics Today

It is easy to write many papers when you continue to apply well-understood techniques. People who develop their own ideas have to work harder for each result, because they are simultaneously developing new ideas and the technique to explain them. Hence they often publish fewer papers, and their papers are cited less frequently than those that contribute to something hundreds of people are doing…

Sometimes it it is asserted that more independent and creative thinkers constitute a greater risk in hiring. But I think an examination of the careers of individual physicists shows that on the whole the opposite is true. It is the creative and independent thinkers who are more likely to make important contributions throughout their lifetime. They are driven by their own curiosity and need for understanding, rather than by career motives.

He goes on to propose changes in hiring and promotion practices to support “creative and independent” thinkers for the advancement of physics. I agree with the first paragraph whole-heartedly. I have ranted before about the broken systems of scientific publication and promotion, and suggested solutions (that don’t have a chance, because publication is a big business).

The latter sentence, although I consider myself one “driven by their own curiosity,” I’m not as enthusiastic about. It is assuming the goal of institutions is to advance physics. This does not describe any university I have been to. Their goal is to raise money, attract students, and climb the diabolical US News rankings. Career-minded scientists, sticking close to well-established fields with a funding track record, are more likely to meet these goals. First of all, he is targeting the wrong audience: he should be targeting the awarding practices of funding agencies, not the hiring practices of academic departments.

In that vein, is it reasonable to ask the public to fund independent, creative research to advance our understanding of the world? It’s easy to argue fundamental physics has already long outstripped our ability to apply it. If the justification for using public funds for science it to reap societal benefits, then it is precisely the sort of well-established techniques that should be funded, as they are applied to technological problems.

Of course, a good deal of public money is also spent on funding highbrow arts, despite the lack of any evidence this has the least bit of benefit for society. But that’s a different rant.

I’ll be checking out Rebecca Goldstein after reading this article. I haven’t had time to read the whole thing yet, I’ll probably comment some when I do. I actually been wanting to write more lately, but with my laptop gone for repairs, I never seem to have access when I have the time. I’m in-between classes (and tweaking on caffeine) again right now, so I must keep it brief.

Amidst my rather insane teaching assignment, I have little time and even less energy to read or write (at the moment, I’m pounding a “Full Throttle” between classes). But this post (via Body & Soul) had to be noted. Of particular poignancy to me…

At a time when China, for instance, is training scientists and engineers like crazy, we seem to be stuck debating whether or not to teach evolution in our schools.

It is my last few days of relative freedom before the sure-to-be hellish double-duty of the first summer term. I have been buried in the Hubbards’ Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms. This is a brilliant book. Every aspiring physicist should take a full year course from this tome their sophomore year. It’s sad I could get a PhD without having seen this contemporary approach to calculus. Penrose has shown me the light, and my Lipschitz ratio is tingling.. I am re-acquiring my penchant for formal mathematical physics. It’s sad I probably won’t get to teach much of this in Mathematical Physics next fall. Linear algebra will be high on my list of topics, but I will probably have to take a more traditional approach.