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While condensed matter is a very important and interesting research field, people in condensed matter are gravitating towards low-effort high-reward problems as

While condensed matter is a very important and interesting research field, people in condensed matter are gravitating towards low-effort high-reward problems as grant committees don't seem to care about the quality of the research being done. This is especially true in my field of soft-condensed (i.e., classical) condensed matter, where questionable amounts of money and time is being spent on problems inspired by biology and engineering, where physicists have made very few legitimate contributions. On the other hand, the number of physicists working on fundamental problems in soft-condensed matter and related areas (e.g., fluid turbulence, elasticity theory, renormalization, etc.) is shockingly small.

zeofig 6y ago
Yeah, I've witnessed this myself. The amount of money that goes into materials projects with "medical imaging" or similar supposed applications is crazy. Most of these "novel" materials are created by some process the authors don't fully understand. They usually have some electrical or optical properties that are unusual, but given the range of possible materials almost anything can turn out to be unusual in some way. Anyway, you combine such materials with a few big names, and you keep the grant snowball rolling rolling rolling, and you publish in Nature XYZ on a monthly basis. Meanwhile I see professors doing good and serious fundamental work in condensed matter (and many other areas) losing their jobs.
- b215826 6y ago
  In this spirit, I really like this disclaimer from the conclusion of a preprint on the arXiv [1]: > This paper is not intended for journal publication. Therefore, it lacks the delusional claims typically found in published papers about its (simultaneous) relevance to drug design, nanoelectronics, photonics, spintronics or any other fashionable application. Also, everyone can sleep at peace without worrying about missed citations and their h-index (and without e-mailing me to complain about them). [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1232v3 https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1232v3

zeofig 6y ago

Yeah, I've witnessed this myself. The amount of money that goes into materials projects with "medical imaging" or similar supposed applications is crazy. Most of these "novel" materials are created by some process the authors don't fully understand. They usually have some electrical or optical properties that are unusual, but given the range of possible materials almost anything can turn out to be unusual in some way. Anyway, you combine such materials with a few big names, and you keep the grant snowball rolling rolling rolling, and you publish in Nature XYZ on a monthly basis. Meanwhile I see professors doing good and serious fundamental work in condensed matter (and many other areas) losing their jobs.

b215826 6y ago
In this spirit, I really like this disclaimer from the conclusion of a preprint on the arXiv [1]: > This paper is not intended for journal publication. Therefore, it lacks the delusional claims typically found in published papers about its (simultaneous) relevance to drug design, nanoelectronics, photonics, spintronics or any other fashionable application. Also, everyone can sleep at peace without worrying about missed citations and their h-index (and without e-mailing me to complain about them). [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1232v3 https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1232v3