@ACuriousMind That's a good idea. In the mean time I've already found an older paper (journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.63.1376) that does discuss what I am looking for, just not in as much detail as I'd like.
@Mew academic institutions require researchers to publish a number of papers in a given amount of time. This is not always easy to do, it's like requiring an artist to make a work of art on demand (and we can see how well that turned out for the music or film industries).
@Mew Please take your unfounded speculations elsewhere, Even if there's something wrong with current academic culture, that most physicists go for "low-hanging fruit" is just plainly untrue and borderline insulting.
As a result, scientists will take pretty much any research direction they can, pump out something, and then beef it up and obfuscate the paper until it reads like something that should be published. Then it usually gets published, but the fact remains that it was originally minor and/or unimportant work pushed through only because the author had to meet a quota.
The obfuscation to achieve this makes the paper mostly useless to anyone else's work and hard to read just for the fun physics of it. As a result, hardly anyone cites it, but the author is given a pat on the back by the institution and has another paper to their name, which further motivates this behaviour. Thus, we become drowned by garbage papers that say mostly nothing in complicated ways instead of reporting useful or meaningful results in helpful or clear ways
Now, I'm not saying that most papers are garbage, only that you'll find more than should be out there because it is not deterred
but what can you do? Institutions need to have some sort of requirement, otherwise some people will sit around never doing any research at all. You need to find a way of motivating research, and I have no better ideas
If my memory serves, the chemistry community is slightly better, as a lot of the funding sources are related to solving real world problems that are increasingly become more important (energy and resources, medical, synthesis, mining, catalysis, high performance materials etc.), thus the motivation aligns with the aims of the research.
some do, however lament about the relative unpopularity of fundamental researches such as those I joined back in my honours year. One of the talks I attended has the speaker emphasising the importance of fundamental research
where if one member of the team doesn't pull their weight they're gone
the team will produce publications not individuals, and there is no individual requirement for publish or perish, but rather team leaders will ensure team members are on track
@Jim I'm pretty sure such a requirement as a clause in an employment contract would be illegal under German law, and the German Science Foundation, a major source for funding, explicitly discourages the publish or perish mentality by limiting the amount of your own papers you are allowed to cite in support of a proposal to a handful, i.e. quantity of papers will get you nothing regarding new grants.
@Mew I'm a cosmologist. A field that provides an excellent example to how research directions and progress can be difficult to determine. Try to put your proposed solutions in a form relevant to my field and I guarantee it'll be easy to convince me
@ACuriousMind I don't know german law, and I'm pretty sure the funding thing is the same here. "Don't cite yourself too much" is a common convention, I'd guess. But I'm taken to understand that research professors around me are required to publish at least one or two papers a year (or was it 5? I'll have to ask someone again) in order to get tenure. It's not a requirement clause, but who doesn't want tenure?
There are, various experimental teams have been searching for dark matter for some 5 decades(?). The results are still not very consistent, though, to warrant a discovery. In the theoretical side, a variety of models are constantly pumping out on what properties the dark matter to be searched, as well models which does not need dark matter or dark energy
@Mew where do you think those leads come from? Who organizes these teams and assigns them? How do you ensure someone is actually pulling their weight? Who decides what the questions to pursue will be? Surely not a business person that knows little of the actual science
UNSW and Griffiths univerity has a national centre for quantum computing, and they have been making great progress along with other teams across the globe
@Mew yeah, the main question is about what form the progress reports will actually be. Everything else is just extra fluff. What you describe is pretty much how things work currently (aside from being forced to work on a specific research topic)
@Jim progress reports should include a summary of what the goals where, and how they were achieved and their importance to the development of the field for the community
@Mew we don't force people to work on a specific topic. Those people might see other questions to answer that a governing board might miss. And they might contribute something more valuable as a result. We do ask that they justify their research choice to get funding, but we don't mandate a topic
What you said happens quite frequently in the private sector and the start ups, if I recall, and also in some govenrment R and D companies, and (to a lesser extent), academia
@Jim Actually, any one having a professorship in Germany can pretty much do whatever they please as long as they fulfill their teaching obligations. You don't get fame (or another position elsewhere) from it, but I'm pretty sure no one will or can fire you because you didn't publish in the last 10 years.
@Jim We don't have the notion of "tenure track" here. You get tenure when you become a professor, but you don't become a professor by fulfilling employment contracts.
(I just checked - we have one professor here whose last paper cited on his homepage is from 2008 and I can't find anything newer on google scholar. And that 2008 paper is the only one on his own homepage which begins with 20)
yeah, tenured professors might go years without publishing. It's just the profs that want to get tenure that feel pressured to publish. Not sure how well our system works
@Jim Well, don't get the impression that it's easier here to get tenure - it's just that we don't call people without tenure "professor" in most cases.
@ACuriousMind people without tenure here are called poor pigs ... I mean, let's be honest, how many people without the tenure can decently live at university for a long period around here?
@ACuriousMind yeah, without tenure you'll be called "associate" or "assistant professor", but professor is still in the title. I suppose naming conventions are a minor matter, however
@Sanya Eh, I think we have a few non-tenured people who've been here for a decent amount of time and seem rather happy. They either hold positions with significant administrative overhead that not many other people want or just seem to have no ambition to become full professors.
But the HR politics in our departments tend to confuse me, so...I'm not really sure about that :D
@ACuriousMind well, we have ... 2 positions in the whole department with administrative overhead big enough to support a fulltime position
and about the no ambition stuff ... I'm not sure whether I understand that new Hochschulgesetz correctly, but isn't the maximum for time-limited jobs 12 years now? After which you'd need an unlimited contract which ... is either the position with admin overhead or a professorship, isn't it?
I like how the comments of you two make JD's answer more meaningful when considered together, by highlighting the meaning of the constancy of the speed of light to future readers and what it means to be VSL vs GR
@ACuriousMind some predictions of QFT are values that become worse with high pertubation order - how can anyone claim that because we can see that a certain pertubation order is a nice fit, the theory has good predictive power and is well tested? :p
@Jim well, let's stay within the realm of physics ...
@Sanya because it's the closest subject to the physics of everyday situations (which most people can relate to and intuition supports) that is still non-intuitive and assaults the validity of an average person's intuition/gut knowledge. It's something that people frequently encounter in enough detail to realize they need to either defend against it or admit their intuition is wrong
@Sanya Not in QED to my knowledge (I think you'd have to go to...137th order to see the asymptotic divergence), but yeah, QCD perturbation really does give terrible results.
But for that, we have lattice methods which do produce very good results...sometimes
In my part of the UK we've just had a warm front blow in from the Atlantic. The temperature has jumped by ten degrees and the relative humidity is now in excess of 90%. Everything, and I mean everything, is now covered in a film of condensation. Lovely.
Can we DDoS a predatory journal by writing a script to inventing false author names and spam them with junk like the "get me off your fucking mailing list" example?
or will this backfire?
NB: false authors means no real world people will be linked by these bot articles, unlike the get me off your fucking mailing list example
The following question contains sensitive and discussion on a potential suggestion of a criminal countermeasure. Therefore please close and/or delete the question asap if it turns out to be unacceptable/inapproporiate (NB Nothing in the meta said question of this nature cannot be posted, as evide...
@Secret the article reminded me of jungs "collective unconscious" theory which probably few (hard) scientists take seriously for a variety of reasons. find it interesting/ significant that there seem to be common dream themes across people/ cultures & think it is worthy of further scientific study & maybe points to something deeper...
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When homework-and-exercises questions are voted off topic and put on hold then the OP should be directed to the Meta Question which offers a choice of alternative sites.
To put this proposal into effect, the notification box could be amended to read :
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I am curious what average professional physicist "does" as part of that job.
I've been watching SixtySymbols videos e.g. about string theory and it seems like physics is mostly pulling absurd stuff out of your ass and hoping someone can see it happen at the LHC?
1. just no. there's many other fields than string theory! 2. see #1 3. see @BernardMeurer's comment. 4. very few people actually understand string theory. it is not absurd stuff; it is a field of study.
@heather I didn't really mean it as an insult, but this guy's a professional string physicist and he (in trying to dumb down his job for the lay person) basically says he just makes things up and hopes they are true... is that like, what modern physics mostly is?
I feels like these things have no connection to "reality" yet.. like, they aren't based on seeing something happen and going "oh I bet I can figure that out."... they're more like "if we play with the equations a bit this really cool thing happens, wonder if that's real?"
@KutuluMike What is science in general if not: Choosing something you'd like to understand; Coming up with a theory on how it works, i.e. figure a way to understand it; Test your model to see if it holds against Nature
@BernardMeurer I'm not at liberty to say. There is a degree of facetiousness involved but I just wanted to remark that this is not simply a trolling exercise so don't ban him straight away...please?
@TomW I can't ban anyone, but, in all honesty and with no offence, it seems like @KutuluMike Is 60% trying to be offensive and 40% trying to ask an honest question
both produce a lot of "irrelevant" results - measurements or theoretical derivations that are not leading anywhere - but that is needed in order to advance
but things like "back in the 60s we had this idea for superstrings and everyone rejected it but later it kinda looks like it would be cool in this spot over here"
@KutuluMike They're quite cool, right? Mapping NP problems into BQP and solving them in P time; that's mostly just physicists working on it right now (on the hardware side)
The fact that there is only one D-Wave with no competitors and no contemporaries in academia publishing peer-reviewed research showing that their own similar machine produces good results gives me the creeps
Sooo, I thought that quantum computers were faster due to 1.) base four number system instead of base 2 numbering system 2.) Entanglement (See black magic)
Even with those two things, how would the algs be substantially different?
@Sidney It's not base 4. A qubit can have a gradient of stages between 1 and 0. Not sure where you got 4 from :)
@Sidney Entanglement is not black magic.
The algs are ridiculously different, see for example Shor's algorithm, that can factorize numbers (NP problem) in P time. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm
Proposal
When homework-and-exercises questions are voted off topic and put on hold then the OP should be directed to the Meta Question which offers a choice of alternative sites.
To put this proposal into effect, the notification box could be amended to read :
put on hold as off-topic by ....
