3 ms·
Teller touches upon this subject. In an interview published on YouTube, he says, increasing scholarships and science funding further doesn’t help; because money
by aborsy 4y ago
Teller touches upon this subject. In an interview published on YouTube, he says, increasing scholarships and science funding further doesn’t help; because money doesn’t buy science, money buys technology; we actually don’t have enough scientists on whom to spend the money. And that, most of the advances in quantum mechanics and atomic physics were made by individuals genuinely interested in problems in these domains, and worked in modest conditions. Quantum mechanics theory took practically nothing to develop.
Politics, of course, is part of the humanity, but it manifests differently in different environments (academia vs industry, or then vs now). There is undoubtedly politics in industry, however, there are also products and reality checks. The companies won’t survive if they operate entirely based on politics. In academia, on the other hand, the environmental feedback can be weaker depending on the subject; there, politics could come to the fore. Amusingly, Kissinger said, politics in academia is specially vicious precisely because the stakes are so low.
As for then versus now, there used to be a lot of low-hanging fruit that could be taken until 1980s, and there weren’t many researchers. But now there are fewer accessible opportunities, with far more researchers. If you consider that the size of the cake has not increased proportionally (due to factors mentioned in the article), while the number of players has increased substantially, you may conclude that the environment has become much more competitive. Increased competition indicates increased politics, emphasis on selling, networking, and other non-scientific factors relevant to industry, except there you actually get paid. The conditions are nowadays totally different. There all sorts of performance metrics (H-index, citations, number of papers etc), that have become target, in place of good science, which are gamed.
- melony 4y agoI can't decide whether Teller's head is stuck up the rafters of the ivory tower he lives in or whether it is held up where the sun does not shine. There are so many students in academia searching for the magic path through graduate school where you can get a permanent role either in teaching or tenureship (research) that it is becoming a crisis for both STEM fields and otherwise. It is easy for him to preach when he is one of the few that have "made it" through a combination of intellectual pedigree, geopolitical necessity, and the plucking of low hanging fruits in an emerging field.
- XorNot 4y agoYeah I really don't understand what he's saying there - where does he think his salary comes from? Money buys those interested individuals time to pursue that interest, and the more of it we have the more people we can put in the right time and place to find the next big thing.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoI think the key point is the "and worked in modest conditions", emphasis on modest. Injecting a ton of money creates perverse incentives and attracts people who are not interested pursuing something out of curiosity and interest, but for the money. I think it probably creates a hostile environment for people who are there out of pure interest, because if there is a way to earn more money/status/power/whatever by doing something other than good work people will do it. So you effectively get punished for doing what you're supposed to instead of playing the game. I think the "professional money extractor" explanation here is an apt description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253.
- melony 4y agoAcademia is a career, not some sort of side project for bored scientists. We don't measure the competence of developers by the time they spend on side projects outside of work. You don't have to be full of visionary ideas to do research, and talent is everywhere. Teller would't be where he was had he been born in South America or Africa. If you only give money and positions to people with "passion" when there is a clear demand for more, that's called exploitation. Maybe consider becoming an aerospace investor instead, that field is full of talent chasing after lost dreams for pennies. If you are a software engineer on this forum, you know damn well what your net worth is in the current North American market compared to the other legacy engineering fields. It is patronizing to expect the other scientific fields to be worth "less" than CS.
- dale_glass 4y ago> Injecting a ton of money creates perverse incentives and attracts people who are not interested pursuing something out of curiosity and interest, but for the money. That's just an excuse to exploit people. The same nonsense as with teachers. "We want teachers that are passionate, not there just for the money". Bah. In the end we're trying to get stuff done, and it doesn't really matter whether the pipes are kept clean by somebody really passionate for sanitation, or somebody who just thinks the pay is good enough to tolerate the smell.
- cycomanic 4y agoThe argument does not hold any sort of deeper inspection. The greats of quantum mechanics, people like Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger etc. we're all professors, which at the time put you up in the highest ranks of the middle class or the lower upper class + the status of the title it implied in Germany for example. They were amongst the highest paid salaried employees. In comparison now a typical professor salary is lower than what many junior software developers get straight out of undergrad. And that is after years of job uncertainty through PhD, postdocs and tenure track. Essentially the only ones left do out of idealism. (I also believe this long uncertainty is a big factor in the large gender imbalance, women are much less tolerant of this then men) The other irony is that Teller himself was part (came out) of one of the biggest counter examples. The Los Alamos project pushed unprecedented funding into science, and it let to many discoveries that would have taken decades longer otherwise.
- kmmlng 4y agoSince you specifically mention Germany: professors are incredibly well paid in Germany and also enjoy high social status. Of course, a lot of them don't do any science, they are the CEO equivalent of an institute. Salaries for PhDs and PostDocs are a different story of course. They are alright in theory, but often you can only get a part time job, which in reality means a > full time job with a part time salary.
- cycomanic 4y agoI was specifically talking about the days of the founders of quantum mechanics or even the times of Teller et al.. Today professors are in fact not that incredibly paid anymore in Germany. Sure they still have reasonably high salaries but compared to junior developers they earn approximately the same. Regarding PhD students yes depending on field, you might get a half position, however I'm not aware that postdocs get low paid positions. Compared to the US differences between professor and PhD salaries are much lower AFAIK.
- benibela 4y ago>professors are incredibly well paid in Germany and also enjoy high social status. Around 80k €/year as W2 professor base salary Post-tax 55k € Guess that might be considered incredibly well paid in Germany
- kmmlng 4y ago> because money doesn’t buy science, money buys technology; we actually don’t have enough scientists on whom to spend the money. I can only speak from personal experience and observations in my environment, but to me this statement sound like a dark, cynical joke. There is plenty of scientists who would love to work on interesting things, are hired as scientists, but once they are hired, no one actually lets them work on scientific problems.
- popcube 4y agothis is restricted in physics, e.g., life sciences need as more as they can get money, they even do not have enough money to pay assistant, there are so many species waiting for identifying, even use old protocol, scientists still need to pay salary, specimen storage fees...