It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.
I think it depends on who has the hot paper and who has the outdated results. I was in academia for quite some time and when sometime cool comes out that renders other results less important, there are always winners and losers beccause the only thing that matters in academia is impact and the latest and greatest - not the blind alleys along the way.
There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
The perspective changes if you're in your last year of PhD as GP said. I'm sure the system is built in a way that you'll still graduate because your supervisor knows this is about learning how to conduct research and not about being right. But it's likely still soul crushing to come out with no published paper (unless you still publish knowing you're wrong, which in some cases might be valuable).
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level.
That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.
Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!
I believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic.
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth.
Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth
I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
Yeah. In principal, scientists should be excited by weird results. In practice, though, humans are complex creatures with intellectual and emotional inertia. There's an understandable element of dread when you realize your life's work finds itself on shaky ground.
I'm a plasma physicist, and personally I love weird results - new mysteries to solve! That said, there are a wide range of personality types out there. And I would also be extremely surprised if the correct solution to some particular weird result was, for instance, that the Maxwell equations are broken for that regime (other than expected quantum corrections, e.g. the Schwinger limit).
Specially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.
I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data.
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful
lol
but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions
and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait
"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
Academic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.
I think it depends on who has the hot paper and who has the outdated results. I was in academia for quite some time and when sometime cool comes out that renders other results less important, there are always winners and losers beccause the only thing that matters in academia is impact and the latest and greatest - not the blind alleys along the way.
There isn't really an "us" in academia like there is in a private company, who all have a common goal: in academia the goal is to get there before another does and be on top.
The perspective changes if you're in your last year of PhD as GP said. I'm sure the system is built in a way that you'll still graduate because your supervisor knows this is about learning how to conduct research and not about being right. But it's likely still soul crushing to come out with no published paper (unless you still publish knowing you're wrong, which in some cases might be valuable).
2 replies →
This happens in biology all the time.
PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level.
That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.
Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
Einstein wanted to measure how fast Earth moves through ether as his research thesis.
For those unaware - the most famous experiment to measure this(both high school and university physics classes have drilled this into my brain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... a long history of experiments failing to find evidence of an ether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity
It's different when you invalidate your own research.
That’s life. Sometimes you see it coming and ride the wave, sometimes you’re late to the party.
I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!
I believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic.
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth.
Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth
I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
5 replies →
The history of scientific revolutions does not support this view
How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen.
Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
20 replies →
Yeah. In principal, scientists should be excited by weird results. In practice, though, humans are complex creatures with intellectual and emotional inertia. There's an understandable element of dread when you realize your life's work finds itself on shaky ground.
I'm a plasma physicist, and personally I love weird results - new mysteries to solve! That said, there are a wide range of personality types out there. And I would also be extremely surprised if the correct solution to some particular weird result was, for instance, that the Maxwell equations are broken for that regime (other than expected quantum corrections, e.g. the Schwinger limit).
Specially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.
They were getting inconsistent results, not just weird ones. However I agree that suicide probably wouldn't be where they would end up.
I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data.
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
2 replies →
In the book they get different results on all tests they run, consistency is gone, that is something else.
well maybe depends how fundamental
if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful
lol
but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions
and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait
"Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
I am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process.
The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
Mathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.
>Physicists don't have that privilege.
Then don't claim it as a strength!
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