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> overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We proba

> overproduction of physics PhDs relative to academic positions available Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries. That said, our scientific communication channels seem filled to the brink. So maybe we need more efficient scientific communication before we can make good use of more researchers.

enkid 5y ago
Is this actually the case? There is a lot of research that is occuring in the private sector or research labs and the such. A lot of it is being done at universities, but us there an actual quantified measure if what percentage of research is not in a teaching institution versus what is?
- pydry 5y ago
  Instead of trying to quantify research (not really measuable in any meaningful sense) perhaps ask yourself how physics has improved your every day life and then ask yourself which improvements you think society should have given up in exchange for a greater supply of quants. Things like the microchip, wifi, rocketry, satellites, jet engines, etc. If the answer is "none of it" that tends to suggest underproduction.
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    This is some rather flawed logic. The productivity of physicists at the time the microchip was invented doesn’t suggest anything at all about the productivity of physicists today, and the utility of productive physics research doesn’t suggest anything at all about the existence of non-productive physics research.
    - pydry 5y ago
      Are you saying that there is a better measure than past performance?
native_samples 5y ago
Do we need more physics research? I guess it depends a lot on how you define physics, but it seems like outside of possibly better silicon nodes, there isn't a whole lot of low hanging fruit in physics at the moment. When physics does get research funding it gets dropped into building giant machines that, at vast expense, have discovered virtually nothing. It feels like right now most areas of academia are consuming far more resources than their useful output could really justify, which is perhaps why in so many fields it's so heavily dependent on government funding (vs say computer science where academic/corporate lab collaborations are quite common).
- nickelpro 5y ago
  An incredibly short sighted view of academic utility. Maxwell's work on radio waves took 30 years to be developed into a "useful output". The purpose of scientific advancement cannot be understood on the timetables of capitalistic utility.
- pydry 5y ago
  "There is nothing new left to be discovered in physics now. All that is left is more and more precise measurement." -- Lord Kelvin, 1900
  - kiba 5y ago
    What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry? There may be a finite amount of works on physics that we can do, or technological niches that we can exploit thanks to discoveries in physics or any relevant field of knowledge. The well of discoveries isn't running dry today, but it may in future generations.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry? We have zero idea how gravity works, how to predict the properties of vast stretches of new materials, if the island of stability is real, what the limits to know propulsion technologies are, what the limits to know fusion technologies are, et cetera. And I’m not even getting to batteries or biology or hosts of related fields.
kragen 5y ago
Maybe what we need is cheaper physics apparatus so you don't need a physics professorship or a big lab to advance the state of human knowledge. You aren't going to scale down the LHC to fit under your bed when you aren't using it, but you could surely fit an XRF, ICP-AES, AFM, and maybe an optical bench in there. For a while I worked at a satellite company whose first cleanroom was made only a few years back by covering the concrete walls with polyethylene film, and a class-10 clean bench that you stick your hands into is within the reach of lots of people. Lots of amateurs have built fusors, but mostly they aren't doing the work necessary to measure reliable, reproducible results, in part because Vixra doesn't offer any incentive to do so. Radio amateurs are one shining exception here, even if most of them are just using store-bought equipment these days.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Theoretical physics just needs pencil and paper. If you do the more computation heavy parts of theoretical physics then add a computer as well.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yes, but historically great advances in theoretical physics have usually followed great advances in experimental apparatus.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc. Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 years later data was found in those experiments to match the theory. What we lack today to further physics isn't experiments, we lack theories that are well formed enough that we can perform experiments to test them.
      - 5y ago
avsteele 5y ago
There are quite a few places like this: * GTRI * Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab * MIT Lincoln Labs * ~All the national labs (NIST, Argonne, etc...) They are still mostly full as I understand. If I was to write an article on what might be improved: We need more translational research (product focused, using existing knowledge) and less academic research. One problem I see is that there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization in physics like there is in comp sci or biotech. Granted I'm biased. I founded my company (zeroK NanoTech) to capitalize on laser cooling research. Two Nobel prizes and countless professors pushing the boundaries on this stuff since the 90's. And my little company is going to be the first to deliver a product that's a black box to the user wrt to the science but delivers some new capabilities. The ion trap quantum computing may yet pay (much larger) dividends to society and those guys are also now making big pushes as well. Might be fair to count the resurgence of rocketry and fusion in this category as well. So maybe things *are* looking up after all!
- robbmorganf 5y ago
  Personally I think we are turning discoveries into products pretty fast, at the least faster than any time in history. My thought was that we need more fundamental discoveries (e.g. like understanding gravity or theories that predict and unlock high temperature superconductors), but the people who discover those things needn't be teaching staff.
- jollybean 5y ago
  " there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization" I worked in tech transfer for a bit. There isn't such a thing as 'translation of science' because knowledge itself is pretty useless, even applied research is. Products - which hopefully embody some of those things - are what people buy and the things that go into making good products are a bit orthogonal to classical R&D approach. Thinking about things from a 'user centric' instead of things having 'intrinsic' value is a big leap that I think takes a few years for some to get. In Academia we think of knowledge as having inherent meaning and value unto it's own - which is totally fine I'm not hear to argue otherwise. But in the real world, it's almost as if you have to view Science as just 'fancy pants tooling' and give it about as much love as your ruler or hammer, i.e. think of it as just a tool to meet some 'ends' wherein the 'ends' is not 'publishing a paper'. In biotech, the 'ends' maybe more mappable, i.e. 'this drug regrows hair in men and women' but as you indicate, it mostly doesn't work this way. Even then, even if we got our surplus PhD's into industry, we still may have this over-capacity. So all of that aside, maybe we are entering the phase where the standard/normative level of education is just really, really high. Like in one of those corny Star Trek places where everyone has a PhD. Just like many of the wealthy, effete folks in the past who got degrees because they were rich and not even interested in pursuing something applied or interesting, 'we're all getting rich now' and perhaps should turn our focus to the 5B people on planet earth who still have material needs.
lmm 5y ago
> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? Because it's cheaper that way. A lab that had to pay market-rate salaries would be outcompeted by the ones that sucker grad students with the promise that a few of them might get tenure someday and pay them peanuts in the meantime.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  There's nothing stopping the new lab from also offering the possibility of tenure. Why would it be outcompeted?
  - lmm 5y ago
    It would be outcompeted because other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Why?
      - lmm 5y ago
        Because if you pay less per worker then you can hire more workers for the same cost. I struggle to see how that's confusing?
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        I'll ask this for the third time, then: Why would the other labs pay less per worker than the new lab?
        lmm 5y ago
        Communication is a two-way street, if your questions are not being understood maybe you should put some effort into making them clearer. Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries. Labs that can dangle the carrot of a tenure-track position can pay much less than those that can't; workers overvalue it both because people generally overvalue potential prizes and because it's been gradually made rarer and pushed back further and further.
Spooky23 5y ago
Because those are the places hiring physicists. When we were focused on building hydrogen bombs and rockets to obliterate civilization, everyone needed a friendly neighborhood physicist.
oblio 5y ago
> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries. It's the American system, frankly. In Germany research institutes are frequently separated from universities.

enkid 5y ago

Is this actually the case? There is a lot of research that is occuring in the private sector or research labs and the such. A lot of it is being done at universities, but us there an actual quantified measure if what percentage of research is not in a teaching institution versus what is?

pydry 5y ago
Instead of trying to quantify research (not really measuable in any meaningful sense) perhaps ask yourself how physics has improved your every day life and then ask yourself which improvements you think society should have given up in exchange for a greater supply of quants. Things like the microchip, wifi, rocketry, satellites, jet engines, etc. If the answer is "none of it" that tends to suggest underproduction.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  This is some rather flawed logic. The productivity of physicists at the time the microchip was invented doesn’t suggest anything at all about the productivity of physicists today, and the utility of productive physics research doesn’t suggest anything at all about the existence of non-productive physics research.
  - pydry 5y ago
    Are you saying that there is a better measure than past performance?

native_samples 5y ago

Do we need more physics research? I guess it depends a lot on how you define physics, but it seems like outside of possibly better silicon nodes, there isn't a whole lot of low hanging fruit in physics at the moment. When physics does get research funding it gets dropped into building giant machines that, at vast expense, have discovered virtually nothing. It feels like right now most areas of academia are consuming far more resources than their useful output could really justify, which is perhaps why in so many fields it's so heavily dependent on government funding (vs say computer science where academic/corporate lab collaborations are quite common).

nickelpro 5y ago
An incredibly short sighted view of academic utility. Maxwell's work on radio waves took 30 years to be developed into a "useful output". The purpose of scientific advancement cannot be understood on the timetables of capitalistic utility.
pydry 5y ago
"There is nothing new left to be discovered in physics now. All that is left is more and more precise measurement." -- Lord Kelvin, 1900
- kiba 5y ago
  What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry? There may be a finite amount of works on physics that we can do, or technological niches that we can exploit thanks to discoveries in physics or any relevant field of knowledge. The well of discoveries isn't running dry today, but it may in future generations.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > What is the likelihood of discovering a new phenomena or largely unexplored field of science akin to the discovery of electricity and electrochemistry? We have zero idea how gravity works, how to predict the properties of vast stretches of new materials, if the island of stability is real, what the limits to know propulsion technologies are, what the limits to know fusion technologies are, et cetera. And I’m not even getting to batteries or biology or hosts of related fields.

kragen 5y ago

Maybe what we need is cheaper physics apparatus so you don't need a physics professorship or a big lab to advance the state of human knowledge. You aren't going to scale down the LHC to fit under your bed when you aren't using it, but you could surely fit an XRF, ICP-AES, AFM, and maybe an optical bench in there. For a while I worked at a satellite company whose first cleanroom was made only a few years back by covering the concrete walls with polyethylene film, and a class-10 clean bench that you stick your hands into is within the reach of lots of people. Lots of amateurs have built fusors, but mostly they aren't doing the work necessary to measure reliable, reproducible results, in part because Vixra doesn't offer any incentive to do so. Radio amateurs are one shining exception here, even if most of them are just using store-bought equipment these days.

Jensson 5y ago
Theoretical physics just needs pencil and paper. If you do the more computation heavy parts of theoretical physics then add a computer as well.
- kragen 5y ago
  Yes, but historically great advances in theoretical physics have usually followed great advances in experimental apparatus.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc. Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 years later data was found in those experiments to match the theory. What we lack today to further physics isn't experiments, we lack theories that are well formed enough that we can perform experiments to test them.
    - 5y ago

avsteele 5y ago

There are quite a few places like this: * GTRI * Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab * MIT Lincoln Labs * ~All the national labs (NIST, Argonne, etc...) They are still mostly full as I understand. If I was to write an article on what might be improved: We need more translational research (product focused, using existing knowledge) and less academic research. One problem I see is that there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization in physics like there is in comp sci or biotech. Granted I'm biased. I founded my company (zeroK NanoTech) to capitalize on laser cooling research. Two Nobel prizes and countless professors pushing the boundaries on this stuff since the 90's. And my little company is going to be the first to deliver a product that's a black box to the user wrt to the science but delivers some new capabilities. The ion trap quantum computing may yet pay (much larger) dividends to society and those guys are also now making big pushes as well. Might be fair to count the resurgence of rocketry and fusion in this category as well. So maybe things *are* looking up after all!

robbmorganf 5y ago
Personally I think we are turning discoveries into products pretty fast, at the least faster than any time in history. My thought was that we need more fundamental discoveries (e.g. like understanding gravity or theories that predict and unlock high temperature superconductors), but the people who discover those things needn't be teaching staff.
jollybean 5y ago
" there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization" I worked in tech transfer for a bit. There isn't such a thing as 'translation of science' because knowledge itself is pretty useless, even applied research is. Products - which hopefully embody some of those things - are what people buy and the things that go into making good products are a bit orthogonal to classical R&D approach. Thinking about things from a 'user centric' instead of things having 'intrinsic' value is a big leap that I think takes a few years for some to get. In Academia we think of knowledge as having inherent meaning and value unto it's own - which is totally fine I'm not hear to argue otherwise. But in the real world, it's almost as if you have to view Science as just 'fancy pants tooling' and give it about as much love as your ruler or hammer, i.e. think of it as just a tool to meet some 'ends' wherein the 'ends' is not 'publishing a paper'. In biotech, the 'ends' maybe more mappable, i.e. 'this drug regrows hair in men and women' but as you indicate, it mostly doesn't work this way. Even then, even if we got our surplus PhD's into industry, we still may have this over-capacity. So all of that aside, maybe we are entering the phase where the standard/normative level of education is just really, really high. Like in one of those corny Star Trek places where everyone has a PhD. Just like many of the wealthy, effete folks in the past who got degrees because they were rich and not even interested in pursuing something applied or interesting, 'we're all getting rich now' and perhaps should turn our focus to the 5B people on planet earth who still have material needs.

lmm 5y ago

> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? Because it's cheaper that way. A lab that had to pay market-rate salaries would be outcompeted by the ones that sucker grad students with the promise that a few of them might get tenure someday and pay them peanuts in the meantime.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
There's nothing stopping the new lab from also offering the possibility of tenure. Why would it be outcompeted?
- lmm 5y ago
  It would be outcompeted because other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Why?
    - lmm 5y ago
      Because if you pay less per worker then you can hire more workers for the same cost. I struggle to see how that's confusing?
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        I'll ask this for the third time, then: Why would the other labs pay less per worker than the new lab?
        lmm 5y ago
        Communication is a two-way street, if your questions are not being understood maybe you should put some effort into making them clearer. Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries. Labs that can dangle the carrot of a tenure-track position can pay much less than those that can't; workers overvalue it both because people generally overvalue potential prizes and because it's been gradually made rarer and pushed back further and further.

Spooky23 5y ago

Because those are the places hiring physicists. When we were focused on building hydrogen bombs and rockets to obliterate civilization, everyone needed a friendly neighborhood physicist.

oblio 5y ago

> Why are positions researching physics so closely tied to academic positions? We probably don't need too many more physics professors but we sure could use more physics research. Or maybe better physics research. Either way, more/better physics discoveries. It's the American system, frankly. In Germany research institutes are frequently separated from universities.