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Could Isaac Newton Get a Faculty Job?
An anonymous reader writes "Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity? That's one of the questions that Glenn Reynolds asks Neal Stephenson in this interview over at TechCentralstation. Others involve the changing nature of fame in an age of fragmented media, the role of the Seventeenth Century in shaping the modern world, and what it's like to write a book with a fountain pen, in the twenty-first century."
All my professors were adjunct part time folks.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I don't think he could get a job, but if he already had one, he could definetely get tenure.
Newton is rumored to have been an uber-asshole. An asshole among assholes. His main trait wasn't that he was eccentric, it was that he was an asshole to each and everyone he met.
It depends on the university and the department chair, but I'm willing to bet that you can find assholes in faculty at any given university.
So yes, Isaac Newton could probably have been hired on despite his assholeness.
The Source of the Modern World
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Published
10/07/2003
Last week's column inspired by Neal Stephenson's new novel, Quicksilver, produced an email from Stephenson's publisher, which led to me chatting with him on the telephone. The result was the following interview, done by cellphone as both of us traveled to different engagements. It's a bit on the casual side, but I found it interesting.
TCS: What got you interested in the Seventeenth Century?
Neal Stephenson: It started with the personal stories of Newton and Leibniz. Then I started to learn about Hooke, and the other members of the Royal Society, and it kind of snowballed. There were so many things going on back then with ramifications and consequences that we feel today that I just got sucked in.
What I found interesting on a political level was that the Cromwell types were pushing a bunch of ideas that struck people as nuts at the time, but that are bedrock principles of modern society -- things like free enterprise and separation of church and state and limited government that took years to actually achieve.
Many of the people called Puritans were small businessmen and independent traders. They had a real bent toward free enterprise, and they developed a real resentment of government and taxes -- as a result, they were free traders. It's like what we see with a lot of pro-business people today.
[We then had an interesting discussion of whether the growth of self-employment today would lead to an increase in such sentiments in the modern world, though we reached
no conclusion.]
TCS: Many of the great minds in your book -- Hooke, Newton, Leibniz, etc. -- were, to put it mildly, kind of weird. But they were brilliant. I've heard a lot of people say that Richard Feynman would be too unconventional to get, or keep, a faculty position today. What about people like Newton, who was much odder? Are we sidelining our geniuses today?
NS: That's a big question. If you kind of read their "blogs" -- diaries of people like Pepys, Hooke, John Evelyn -- it's clear that they were pretty elastic, pretty adaptable, in their social arrangements. It didn't seem to faze them at all to deal with people who had odd social quirks. I think that's partly an English thing, part of having a clubby attitude. If you were a part of this club, the Royal Society, a pretty wide range of behavior was tolerated.
Today, well, I don't have enough firsthand experience with the modern academic world to have a sound opinion. But you can see examples of where really talented [eccentric] people today have been able to find a niche in the business world instead of academia.
In business, if you can make money, the personal oddities get overlooked. The bottom line is the bottom line.
In an academic setting you're looking at a different bottom line. It's a far more complex social environment that one has to navigate to get ahead, dealing with students, alumni, colleagues, the administration, and so on. I think you're onto an interesting question. It's too bad that there's not some kind of an index of eccentricity that we could use to compare the academic world and the business world over time.
TCS: Will your new website feature a blog?
NS: Not in the sense of chronological writing. Did you see the Metaweb site? That has some things in common with a blog. If someone asks a question, I can put up an answer. So that serves some bloglike functions. But to do something like that every day would totally interfere with getting books written.
TCS: I understand that you did all the writing on the Baroque Cycle books by hand, using a fountain pen. Did that make a difference?
NS: Absolutely. The key difference is that it's slower. It's like when you're writing, there's a kind of buffer in your head where the next sentence sits while you're outputting the last one. As long as it's still in your head, it's easy to manipulate that next sentence, or even to reject it
sir issac lime could!!! I never got that otterpop... it was odviously a pun on sir issac newton, but it didn't make as much sense as the others (which is scary!). it had to be that it was originally green apple and they had it already printed up or something.
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
The spectre of lawsuits arising from apples to the head would be enough to turn Sir Issac away at the door.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
His eccentricity would no doubt have been diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. He would have been drugged with narcotics and told to behave himself.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
He would probably be a damn good gardener though.
The HR blimp would call him "overqualified" and middle management would ignore him because his agency told him to "put his education last."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
This isn't just science. How many major computer companies were founded by people who never even finished college? Dell, Microsoft, Apple, and so on, these are all companies that would never hire their own founders considering them unqualified. I'm reasonably certain that this problem persists in other industries as well.
Glenn Reynolds is a partisan right-wing hack who believes that if you opposed the war with Iraq, you are "objectively pro-Saddam".
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
If Isaac newton was alive today he would not be a physicist. He would be a laid off geek sitting and reading slashdot. So, the question of whether he would be accepted as faculty is moot.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
If anyone's interested, James Gleick recently released a wonderful biography of Sir Isaac. It's a very entertaining, very fast read.
Disclaimer: I've never read any other Newton biography, so I can't validate the accuracy. ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
This the current "publish or perish" environment all those papers establishing the fields of Physics and Calculus may not be enough...
Actually, this is a very good question. Not because of "excessive quirkyness" because many of the great professors I have met are "querky or weird". But I wonder if Newton would have been able to handle Relativism and Quantum Physics. Many physicists of Einstein's time couldn't handle Relativism and Einstein himself had a problem with Quantum Physics. If Newton lived to 1000 years old I wonder if he could have handled the shifts.
Brian
Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity?
Society is quite different from the academy. I've had classes taught by VERY eccentric (but good) faculty. I think there's something about getting tenure that brings out the kookiness in many people.
And a Newton joke, told by my mechanics prof in 1st year:
Why did Newton invent calculus?
Because he was bored and sexually repressed!
If you read some of his writings, Newton does sound depressed.
Don't kid yourselves. Politics is part of the process and I don't mean personal politics. I mean political positions on things like school choice, regulation of the economy, etc.
The question is: would Newton be smart enough to keep his mouth shut?
He would have to stay off the blacklist.
Newton could've gotten a job in academia. Anyone who has attended any university course knows that "eccentricity" isn't a trait that KEEPS people from getting a job as a professor. If anything, it helps. And if you don't believe me, the Simpsons is the final word on the eccentricity of professors. http://www.snpp.com/guides/prof.frink.html
If Isaac Newton were alive today he'd most likely be some kind of centuries old mummy-creature. I doubt he could get valet parking, let alone a job.
*Splort*
Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity?
Modern society might be, and often for good reason, but if there's any place where eccentricity is tolerated, or promoted even, it's academia. I often think that many of the professors are purposefully eccentric. It's almost become something expected of the truly gifted, and many fraudulently flaunt their own eccentricity for the express purpose of making others think they are gifted. They've heard too many stores about Einstein, Turing, and Newton and get delusions of grandeur.
The fact is, most Universities won't care if you wear your underwear outside of your pants if you manage to do something truly brilliant. You won't be hired to teach, you'll be hired simply so the University can advertise that you're on staff.
Well, that explains our predicament then, doesn't it?
How about Linus? Was he self-educated?
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Sorry to say, I'm not kidding...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
John Nash was extremely eccentric but held down positions at MIT.
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i confess a lack of historical knowledge here, but wasn't Newton wealthy? wasn't he able to sit around and ponder great mathematical/physical questions because he didn't have to worry about a paycheck?
if that was the case, i think the real question is, how many independently wealthy people out there these days sit around and ponder the world? i can only think of Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) and Dean Kamen (dialysis, segway), but even they got wealthy and continue to make money by putting their eccentric thinking towards earning themselves money.
DeVry Institute
if the schizophrenic, homosexual, and sometimes just downright bizarre John Nash (forget what you saw in the overly romanticized movie 'A Beautiful Mind'), could maintain a presence in academia and eventually win the Nobel Prize for Economics, then it is likely that Sir Issac Newton could have held a position as a tenured professor.
although it must be asked: through what lens are we looking at when we say Sir Issac Newton was eccentric? sure he wrote stuff that may seem wierd today, like treatises that speculated on the geological location of Hell. but one must keep in mind that during his time, most scientists were actually "natural philosophers", who investigated matters of philosophy and religion, as well as pure science.
Newton did make most of his equipment himself, such as grinding his own lenses for Studies in Opticks. I doubt that he would be able to go that today.
-- I hereby announce, on behalf of my great ancester Oog, a retroactive patent on THE WHEEL.
The university system is one of the last havens of eccentricity. It's full of eccentrics. To claim otherwise bespeaks an ignorance of university culture.
"Normal" people end up in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law where there truly is no room for eccentrics.
That or become a CEO like Darl.
Are you guys so ignorant you think the poster was joking or what?
He was indeed an asshole and it ain't funny
Eccentricity is ok, its the whole dead thing that might make it hard for him to get hired. Then again, with some of the braindead teachers I have had in the past, maybe not.
What do you mean you haven't published anything in over 300 years??
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
4:00PM tomorrow.
Isaac Newton would have found a position somewhere where his eccentricity would have been accepted. The very nature of being eccentric leads itself to being adverse to accepting normalcy.
I'm confident that Newton would have found his way into a field that would have afforded him the opportunity to stretch his eccentricity. Will Bill Gates be remember 300 years from now, or will the the people behind new ideologies,concepts, or the creators of the next next social revolution be remember? Only history will tell us.
-B
Even what is left of his now fully decomposed bag of bones would smell better than most of the professors I had while getting my Electrical Engineering degree.
If he published a paper at least once a year for two or three years then maybe the University of Piddlesquat Oklahoma might want him. Need a job.. publish, young man! The trick is to publish about something esoteric enough to be considered tops in your field. If you can't dazzle them with brilliance then...PUBLISH
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
In his day, he held chair at oxford.
Hawking now holds his chair.
No jokes please.
- Academic advancement depends on the ability to entertain.
- Being incapable of smiling (independent of laughing) is a career limiting factor in the 21st Century.
Err...Chair? Oxford?
perhaps you are talking about the position of "Lucasian Professor of Mathematics" at Cambridge University.
The mandate to be published is tainting the integrity of professors. Being published is valid only for the right reason of stating new angles to an argument, in my humble opinion. If publication is for the sake of being published, then it is a waste of time. What is worse is being published only for discussing the trendy technology at the time only to get new funding.
How does this relate to Newton? I think a modern Newton would keep quiet until seeing the proverbial apple falling, only then would he/she feel the need to publish.
According to the film A Beautiful Mind, he also worked for the CIA scanning newspapers for secret Communist communiques.
*big wink*
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Ben Franklin would probably get arrested for flying a kite without a license.
I have met a lot of Profs in Chemical Engineering and not a single one of them is what society would call normal.
Newton would fit right in.
Physics profs are pretty strange also.
Perhaps. Perhaps I'm trolling. Or maybe,
just maybe, I'm drunk.
I know this was completely off topic but I found it funny that the completly unrelated post below it was this post. Notice the header.
I didn't know Isaac Newton was still alive!
I think that given his age and his contributions to the physics world, he should be given an honorary job at least, and give him tenure too, Jebus the man's old enough.
moo.
I'd just like to say that while the question presented is somewhat interesting, Neal Stephenson is a complete hack. That is all.
--
This is extra filler. Don't read this or you will be waiving your sixth and fourteenth amendment rights! (Non-US citizens are exempt).
Well, Sort of. I was the president of the Society of Physics Students for two years. The faculty wanted student input, so I interviewed all of the finalists for the positions. Two of the three were fairly normal, but that last one was VERY eccentric. Or at least that's what people would call him if he was rich.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Your politics have to march lock-step with the liberal PC professor troops.
I remember seeing an interview once with a man who according to IQ tests was the (or one of the) smartest man currently living. He went on about how he was smarter then Einstein but how no one would hire him without a degree and it was so hard to meet other smart people, etc. He said he was going to write a book that would change how we think about physics or something like that, was a bouncer and frankly from what I heard I probably wouldn't hire him either. It takes more than just brains, it takes the desire to use them and that is what great scientists have. You always hear about the mythical super-genius who doesn't get the great education and suddenly gets it and revolutionizes the world, in reality if they didn't bother learning basic math what makes you thnik they'll bother with string theory.
That's what makes the great scientists, the love of learning, and that's why I think Newton would have made it to Faculty today (assuming he didn't decide to work for a mega-corporation instead). Maybe he wouldn't have flown through school, he could probably find it slow enough to bore him but I feel that modern schooling is dynamic enough from 50 years ago that he would have made it through, remember this is a man who loved to learn, I mean it can't be much less stimulating then 17th century schooling! Now assuming he decides to go into mathematics (or physics) again he goes to university. Now assuming that due to boredom he didn't get great high school marks (I suspect unlikely) Newton wasn't exactly from a poor family and could of probably gone into whatever school he wanted. Once he's in university he's on the path and can pretty much do whatever he wants. If he gets the marks which he could definately do eccentricity would be no obstacle and he would make it into Faculty in no time.
I stole this Sig
Everything on a college campus nowadays is so damned politically correct that anyone with the qualifications to be a professor would stay the Hell away.
All it takes now to get the job is to be so far left that the middle looks far right. Communism, socialism, and homosexuality are rampant in the hallways and classrooms.
I don't think Newton would fit in very well and he probably wouldn't want to fit it at all.
Survive college and graduate school. He'd need to get into a decent college which really isn't too bad for most people of intellect. He would then need to be selected for graduate school. Given the meat grinder that that process is, based on test scores and "refernce letters (aka who blows^H^H^H^H^H knows who system" chances are fair he'd probably end up at a non-prestigous school (strike 1!).
Then he'd have to survive the meat grinder of grad school itself. Sucking up to professors, jumping through artificial test hoops, begging, and whoring himself for assistantships. Upon completing his thesis hope he hasn't pissed off his professor (oops--Isaac you left to go to theology studies on Sunday mornings, no recommendation for you, you could have spent that time developing quantum gravity instead of regular gravity, and if you really applied yourself you could have had quantum relatavistic gravity.....) Strike 2.
Hey Isaac! You've just earned your degree after earning ~15K for 6 years at a "part-time" job where you worked 80+ hours per week. Now in exchange for a double of your pay raise--you can take a temporary (2-year) job as a post-doc and be expected to work even harder, longer hours. No need to thank us. (strike 3!)
Now Dr. Newton needs a professor ship and he's got between 1-3 strikes against him.
I think Issac may have been like many (but not all) science Ph.Ds and took the money and run... (pssst buddy--check this out--For 80 to 100Gs, I'll give you 2 days off a week, PAID vacation, and I'll even let you see the sun sometimes. While we're at it--take some stock, have some decent health care. All ya gotta do is sell your soul to the Devil "aka The Man, aka Industry"
Issac thinks a minute......
Fsck Hooke and Liebonitz! (I never could spell his name--lousy scum). I'm takin my vacation at Disneyland (PAID)!
Yeah I'm a too little negative on the system after going thru it (my therapist says its good to vent my anger)--but it weeds out far too many good people with the bad. People who instead of working stupifying hours chose that thing called a family (yes even geeks finds Sig. others) or sleeping at night. Add to that the buracracy of gettin hired as a prof and the whole tenure inbred system. Is it anywonder that our Univeristies are populated with psychotic misifts with the social skills of Hitler?
Cthulhu for president!
Think about the genius/population ratio. According to this world population data, there were roughly 600 million to 1.1 billion people on earth during the 17th century. Currently there are something like 6.3 billion people on earth. Since there are more people there are more geniuses also.
helps to make the link a real link if you want the slashdrones to follow through and slashdot the server - but I guess you dont know any html or anything, clearly because you are a fat fucking fucktard, much like the slashdrones.
No porridge for you, wanker!
Get a life you sore and sorry ass fascist sympathizing nazi piece of shit. White people have the most opportunity in the world.
And why? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen with octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood...."
This is Glenn Reynolds, the guy who finds "too confusing" something that boils down to "during a 'war on terror' someone in the White House outed a covert CIA operative, who worked on WMD, endangering her contacts overseas and any other agents who were working under the same front company"
Might as well send Gary Coleman to do it.
The big issue would be the debate about who invented calculus. I want to know how that would have gone over had it happened today. Huge plagiary debates! Different notations! Huge egos! Different philosophies!
I say he couldn't. Not in our modern world. One of the things he was most proud of was his ability to have remained chaste. Between MTV and slashdot, no chance of him getting anything worthwhile done.
IF Isaac Newton lived today he could probably get an academic job in England or the U.S. At least if he published something truly brilliant first and then applied for a job.
... OK, more nuts) with all the time he would be obliged to waste massaging students' egos, marking student assignments and attending teaching skills courses.
IF Isaac Newton lived today and took a job in within the English university system he would go nuts (well
IF Isaac Newton lived today and got an academic job he would quit academe quick smart and get a job in the financial sector, earn a decent amount of money and do research just for fun.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
I have a BS. I guess I have no shot at all.
Thanks for the info.
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A better niche for Newton in modern society would have been a research job at a national lab -- no teaching required, just research.
You also have to realize that the research world was a massive disaster back then. People didn't publish their results. There were no scientific journals. Newton invented calculus, found the laws of motion, and analyzed the motion of the planets. Then he sat on his discoveries for decades (and only eventually published the Principia because he wanted to build a claim that Leibniz and Hooke had taken ideas from him, rather than the other way around).
So let's not imagine a golden age when it was OK to be a socially nonconforming geek.
Find free books.
Newton was brilliant. However, he was an extremely petty individual who did all of his important work before 35. After that he spent most of his time having a homosexual crush on a young man at the school. When the young man left, he had a nervous breakdown and was never the same again.
This is a kind of inversion of Warhol's idea, that everyone would be famous -- to everyone else -- for fifteen minutes. In the future, maybe everyone will be famous for a long time, but to a limited group.
Interesting, Neal, but highly dubious. Warhol's prediction that everyone will be universally famous for 15 minutes probably won't actually turn into everyone becoming famous for a long time to a limited group. What is more likely, with the fragmentation of the media, is that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes to an increasingly smaller audience. That is, if any change has to be made at all, which is anything but certain.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Did Newton (and a whole lot of other people) have a degree?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It was all Leibnitz anyway
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The important question, then, is whether his post about dropping an apple from a tree would earn him a +5 insightful or -1 troll.
Gray Davis is dead.
Itz naht ah rumour!
Speaking as someone who lives in Hollywood (where eccentricity is often tolerated entirely too much...), I'm not prepared to accept the assertion that intolerance to nonconformity is denying society the fruits of genius on a significant scale.
Sure, you're gonna find a "mad" genius or two, whose inability to fit into society leads to isolation, instutionalization or incarceration. And for every one of them you'll find at least a thousand just-plain-whackos. I daresay that we've "lost" more natural math geniuses to them being born as Kalahari Bushmen who never saw a zero in their whole lives, then to over-adherence to any collection of cultural mores.
The benefits of encouraging a certain level of - call it consistency - more than likely outweigh the detriments. Of course it can go too far; nobody would suggest that dressing a specific way be used as a criteria for hiring in an academic institution, for one example. But asking that the faculty generally refrain from habitually making up nonsense words in ordinary conversation, and that they bathe now and then and try to remember to at least WEAR clothes - I reckon that's a good thing.
Perfectly Normal Industries
To be relatively brief. Teaching ability is not a major criterion at universities that emphasize research. Why you might ask? Overhead which is an approximately 50-100% additional fee tacked on to the cost of a research proposal. This fee is kept by the university to fund the support functions to the grantee.
Let's say Newton got a grant for $200K with an additional $133K overhead at a rate of 67%; this is about the norm. Hmmm, $133K is not too shaby.
Finally, "weirdo scientific" profs are acceptable by university admins. Politically charged profs cause them more problems.
Well, we all admire Newton for his physics and his mathematics. But you don't hear too many people praising his alchemy, his astrology, or his religous/apocalyptic histories. I imagine that his work in these latter three fields would tend to push him to the sidelines of academia. But, that doesn't mean he wouldn't get a position somewhere.
Logic, macros, and more
Hey, it's still possible, if you've got the balls to apply. Good places realize that sometimes a college education really means you knuckle under to the Man easily.
I knew a bunch of people at Apple who were degree-less. They sure were more fun than the degreed ones.
One of the things Newton didn't do is kiss ass, which seems to be around 80% of the hiring prereq.
Newton would've joined a dot-com instead.
OTOH, maybe MIT or CalTech would have hired him. Those institutions still have balls.
He probably would, if he cared enough. Social trimmings was something he had regard for. Enough pressure is applied that. I don't think Einstein would for his own safety.
Hey! That's the same position Cmdr. Data holds in the future!
Not unless the music department needed someone to do some decomposing.
ba-dum-chisssh
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If you think you want only the top 1% to work at your company, you shouldn't create a company. What matters much more than credentials, to create a succesful company, is the ability of the employee to work in a team, and to meet goals - and to overcome obstacles. Far to many of the recent top 1% lack this ability - and this is ofthen the most important. Besides, there's only a finite group of companies that can hire the top 1%, or 10%, or whatever%
In A Beautiful Mind, the point was that John Nash only THOUGHT he was helping the CIA look for secret communiques. He had severe mental problems, and the imaginary CIA job was put in in order to communicate that.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
as long as he did not try to shoot them off his students' heads...err oops wrong famous old guy
Not with that haircut! hohoho
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
would he be snart enough to open his mouth in front of the right people?
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
Good one. There be a little something extra for you this year! I remeber little isaac. I'd bring him a toy, and he would spend all day dropping it. ho ho ho
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
3rd week of January, 2004...although that's probably giving him 3 weeks more than he'll get, lol.
As a poet friend of mine used to say; 'If Shakespeare were alive today, he would drive a grey metallic Volvo sedan.'. There is no comparison to be made between past and present; it's a trivial and conceited thing to do. Universities work the way they do because it's functional. If you want to make a case for a more tolerant of eccentricity academia, make it based on real arguments, not contrived ones.
The proper title is Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis. The only time I ever found Latin useful was when I had to write an essay on Newton and the only copy of the Principia in the library was the Latin version. Stretching a point, you could say, in fact, that Latin was the first scientific programming language.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
and nobody would even realise he's dead!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There are two universities in England, Oxford and Cambridge, but they are both based at Oxford. Every year they hold a boat race in London. The winners get an honorary scholarship to Harvard or Yale.
Up until now, however, I didn;t think that /. readers belonged to this American majority.
Erik Demaine got a professorship at MIT despite being home-schooled while traveling around the US. I don't see why Newton wouldn't if he was qualified. http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id=384 DB547-E42E-43ED-9CD4-B70149339A62
You know it's a joke.
It seems there is something missing today in much of communication, and I am guilty of contributing to this, as I'm sure are many of you. Email, telephone, and perhaps worst of all: chat rooms. All of these things contribute to the attitude of raking our discourse in the mud; we treat it as so common and vulgar, as though it is an ugly tool not an art. We must all take an active role in preserving and promoting that grand and noble thing which is rational dialogue between two human persons.
Very few of us have the opportunity to particpate in, for example, discourse through publishing scholarly papers, and even for those who do, the whole processes is necessarily exclusive.
I believe that manual letter writing is perhaps the most rewarding means of communication. Yes, manual letter writing: that thing people do with a real pen and real dead-tree paper, like your mother and aunts and grandmothers did and, if living, probably still do. Our mothers do more to promote an atmosphere affirming the dignity of human dicourse than probably do many of us!
every letter has a greater sense of importance - It could be weeks before you receive a reply, and how the world can change in that time; the letter is an occasion to "put on your best suit and use your finest china", as it were.
it is deliberate - You might take a week to ponder and absorb the thoughts of your interlocutor before evening sitting down to write. Writing your response - what must suffice as the only communication between the two of you for perhaps weeks or more - is a task for more than even a single evening. This is no 30 word email that you bang out in as many seconds.
it necessitates greater attention to quality and clarity - This is a grand occasion. If you do not put forth your best effort, you will regret it immediately. How many of you have thought to yourselves, "I should have said that instead?" Here there is no recourse. You can not call up your acquaintance and offer a clarification or warning before it is read; you can not send off a follow-up email to explain yourself that evening.
it provides for cooler heads - You may be steaming-mad now, but consider how horrible you will feel in many days or even weeks when you receive a reply. Oh, how foolish you will feel when you must read your brash and irrational words quoted to you then!
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
To be honest, given the current environment, I have my doubts that Richard Feynmann would get tenure at the moment especially inhis younger years.
See my journal, I write things there
My astronomy prof at Harvard said that Newton invented freshman physics. He could always teach that.
I think Archimedes had them both beaten by 2000 years or so.,
This the current "publish or perish" environment all those papers establishing the fields of Physics and Calculus may not be enough..
actually no. In my institution the metric they use is the number of times your articles are referenced by other researchers.
No problem for Newton there
(This metric can cause some interesting hacks, BTW. Much inter-institutional acadedmic politics is a sort of "you reference my back, I'll reference yours" mutual understanding )
Working for necessity's mother.
I play fiddle in a punk band [siobhan.ca] that seriously doesn't suck.
Punk bands are supposed to suck. Just one of my pet peeves, I guess, but it seems that punk bands of the last 10 years or so have lost sight of this (not that they don't suck, but rather they think they don't suck). It's supposed to be offensive music in bad taste and deliberately so.
Anyway, no personal offense I hope, it's just something that gets to me.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Over 80% of Newton's work wasn't about physics at all, but about alchemism, which was a higly esteemed area of research in his day and age.
So now he would be rejected by any university on the grounds of being un-scientifical.
I already had two MAD processors - psycotic, even commited to a mental institution. No problem about that (of course both were awful teachers)
how long until
Once (an old job) my boss had to define an employee ranking policy for our department. In the document he defined that a consultant should have a college degree. When the manager reviewed the policy he told him to change that line, otherwise he [the manager] would have to fire me, because I was a consultant and college drop out.
Disclaimer: If I disagree with you I'm probably trolling...
From what I understand, he didn't start to get ecentric till later in life when he began to experiment with mercury. He obviously experimented with it too much though since by the end of his life he was a raving lunatic. Too bad he sucked Halley in to, Halley was a great, some even think a better, scientist than Newton was. Then he fell into orbit around Newton...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Maybe the Alchemy that Stephenson suggests Newton was involved in is just what most British universities need to be able to start paying the professors that they already employ...
-- The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
The academic hiring process is really more scattershot than anyone lets on. Lots of places might turn down Sir Isaac, just as lots of publishing houses would probably reject his manuscript were it submitted today.
Brilliance, even genius, are appreciated in some quarters but most faculty hiring committees are not really looking for genius. Publications and research agenda are important - can the candidate produce enough journal articles yearly, and how do the interests of a candidate complement the research of the current faculty? How does the candidate's personality "fit" with his potential colleagues? 9-5 stability is important when teaching and administrative duties are required. The school a candidate graduated from can be important. The color of the tie or the scarf worn to an interview might have an effect.
The hiring system is usually a semi-rational committee with a complex subconcious mind.
This fellow was hired.
Professor wins "genius" grant
Apparantly, he's not an ass, but certainly from a non-traditional background.
Dewey
Newton was a devout Christian and a creationist. That doesn't play well in the modern scientific community, where atheism and agnosticism are the ruling ideologies. If Isaac Newton were applying for a university job today, he would be treated with disdain. From this biography:
He loved God and believed God's Word-- all of it. He wrote, 'I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by men who were inspired. I study the Bible daily'. He also wrote, 'Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance'.
Today, well, I don't have enough firsthand experience with the modern academic world to have a sound opinion.
And this is from the autor of the Big U. A book about the modern academic world... Hmm...
So perhaps he doesn't have enough experience with Finux to write about it.
Since 1979 Stephen Hawking has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair was founded in 1663. It was held by Isaac Newton in 1669. I don't know if you could classify Hawking as weird, but he is definitly not your average professor.
...ummm...
Sydney Brenner (Nobel prize and two Gairdners) has talked about "Zombie Biology", which is a concept worth looking up if you haven't heard of it...
Basically there are two paths you can take in science - one, originality, come up with something truly new. The second, apply existing problem-solving algorithms to a very specific question no-one has gotten around to answering yet. This is basically an assembly-line job, just follow the recipe.
The first requires a combination of work and freedom from work - you need to get stuff done, but you also need time in which to think broadly, in a non-burnt-out state.
It's the second path that requires working 24/7, sacrificing your family etc. If you are just iterating what is (to those in the field) obvious, you can bet someone else is too, and if they work 23 hours a day, you'd better work 24 if you want to get there first (and of course patent). This is not science. Profitable, yes, science, no.
With the increased focus on patentability & profitability, the focus is shifting heavily to the second path. Anyone who's done time in grad school knows Newton would be raked over the coals for wasting time sitting under apple trees and thinking! The current system measures "love of science" as "lives in the lab" and in the process destroys the most important part of science - the motivation to think independantly.
Newton would probably quit & go into something more rewarding, if he wasn't kicked out first for lacking the "commitment".
Interesting article, especially the comparison between the acid-free paper vs digital media: as most if not all things made nowadays, it is made to last just a couple of years so one can sell much more of it I guess, in contrast to stuff made in the 17,18,19th centuries which we can still perceive nowadays and often enjoy for its beauty and sincere design.
Where I would like to comment on is this phrase: 'I do think that society has a craving, hardwired in somehow, to have a few people, no more than a couple of dozen maybe, who are universally famous, people like J. Lo or Britney Spears.'
To my view this is a bit overstated. The mentioned artists have been marketed so intensely worldwide that most if not all of the people listening to the commercial radiostations that play a very limited set of songs (plugging) know these fashion-model/singers.
In short, it is not the craving (pull) of the people but rather the push from the record companies that make these people globally famous.
Surely some people (especially when in early puberty) still have the need to idolize persons, but this is in my view a remnant of primitive religious reflexes, similar to worshipping impressive/tasty animals or collectively dance around the fire like these animals, things we did a couple of thousand years ago, apparantly still some people still have these needs...
Above the community college level, all that matters is bringing in grant money. It doesn't matter how lousy Newton's personality is, it doesn't matter if he is a lousy teacher. As long as he brings in plenty of grant money, he could get tenure any where. If he doesn't bring in any grant money, even a genius like Newton wouldn't get tenure.
Wasn't he the guy that came up with Palmtop computing ?
...it took years of pressure from his collegues at Trinity College before he even really begun publishing any of his work.
He would have fit in very well in the Mathematics department at my alma mater, Boise State University. Most of the professors in that department (at least for undergraduate math classes) were so ill-suited for teaching (or virtually any other sort of pursuit that required interaction with other people) that I recall hearing rumors that the College of Engineering was tempted to start their own math program so that the Math Department wouldn't nip a budding engineer in the bud by providing their standard, substandard classroom instruction.
I remember (with perfect clarity) the first day of Calculus I. The professor came in, told us that the only reason that he taught the class was because the department made him, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the semester complaining about what idiots we were because we couldn't learn what he was "teaching". That was the most cherished "C" that I ever received. Oh, wait, it was the ONLY one that I ever received!
All I can say is that it's a good thing that my EE professors were so willing to help me out when I was learning Calculus...the Math professors sure didn't help!
-h-
Uh oh, your joke detector is broken. Or perhaps it was too subtle for you. Maybe a hammer would work better.
Steve Mann
One of the more eccentric profs I've encountered. Although his web page serves as no indicator, his brother, Richard, is only slightly less eccentric:
Richard Mann
Funny that both of them are profs at Canadian schools.
Probably what's most significant is that they both do interesting and valuable research.
In general, I think a certain degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder is a requirement for a faculty job. If you're too normal, you don't make for a good candidate.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
How dare you even mention the W word on Slashdot!!!???
:)
But you have a valid point, I suppose
I've heard there's hiring bias for white males as college professors...So I think he's out of luck, no matter what he publishes.
Why does slash ask stupid questions?
The article is mistitled. The real news here is there's a new Neal Stephenson book out, Quicksilver, as of late September. Looks like the same universe as Cryptonomicon, but 3 centuries earlier.
There's lots more, and you never can know too much history, but these seem fairly apropos of the period Stephenson covers, and may offer a bit more understanding of the period and characters.
Both in the way the interview was framed and in much of the discussion here, there seems to be an assumed correlation between geniuses and academics. While being an academic (Ph.D. Candidate), I personally don't think this correlation holds. Granted, there's probably a higher proportion of geniuses in academic positions than anywhere else. In fact, despite what Stephenson (the interviewee) may say, I think Academia is probably the best place for a genius. But, MacArthur "Genius Grants" notwithstanding, this possibility doesn't imply anything in terms of academic geniuses, however defined.
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, Academia isn't a trophy but a place to do a specific type of work centered on teaching and/or research. The prestige associated to academic positions in some contexts has very little to do with the work academics do.
As for eccentricity, Academia does tolerate it in many ways and there's clearly a significant level of freedom in most academic contexts, at least for those who hold jobs. And applications for academic jobs do, IMHO, tolerate a larger margin of eccentricity and originality than most other applications. Interestingly enough, there seems to be an increasing number of jobs opening up in academic institutions. Not a boom per se, but a situation where job prospects are on the increase nonetheless.
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
If you are kind of a button-down, normal type, I think the rest of the Math faculty would have serious reservations about hiring you. Eccentricity is not only tolerated but encouraged.
> You would never get published without a University backing you.
You have no clue at all.
I've *been* published without a university or company backing me. High school students have been published. People get published all the time without a university or company backing them.
Whether research gets published is - primarily - based on the quality of the research. Because it's hard to fund research on your own, most research is done with the backing of a company or university, but there's nothing stopping Joe Random from submitting good research and having it accepted.
Einstein worked at a patent office while researching special relativity, but he still got published. I know people who've been papers chairs for big conferences, and they don't give a damn whether a paper is "backed" by a big institution or not - if the research is good, it gets in. Period.
Reading through this thread, I am absolutely struck by the ignorance displayed about the life and times of Isaac Newton. He is one of the most important figures in history. He lived a fascinating life. I'd recommend Michael White's biography, "Isaac Newton: The Last Sorceror" to the interested.
It seems today having a landmark paper or two isn't good enough, so he'd have to take a dozen or so papers talking about his ideas on calculus and physics and recycle them into a hundred papers, and then he might get tenure.
Vote for Pedro
are a retard.
Well, when the Newton Chair at Cambridge is vacated by Stephen Hawking, maybe Issac could get an in on that position.
Since when has GNU cared about making its man pages intelligible? Or helping newbies? Just pop in the CD-ROM and you're learning? You mean after you've spent 6 hours figuring out how to mount an ISO9660 filesystem, download a media player, install all the dependencies, find and download the right codecs, and troubleshoot it when it keeps crashing on startup? I laughed though, B+ troll.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
... but you're consulting some top dogs in serious business matters without them asking for any credentials? Not even a reference from your last client or what? Sounds like a bum in a suit could walk into Bank of America and advise them to switch their core banking infrastructure to Perl skripts. Tell me what I'm not understanding here.
This comment is printed on 100% recycled electrons.
This got marked as a troll? Perhaps the moderator did not read the article where NS states he does not have experience with the academic world. Or perhaps he did not read the Big U by NS about the academic world? Or perhaps he does not know what Finux is? (hint: like Linux but fictional).
Isaac Newton could get a job in the academy, but it depends on what kind of job you mean. If you mean a part-time, low-paying, temporary job, sure, no problem. If you mean a real, full-time, tenured job -- er -- that depends: - does he have a research grant? - was his dissertation supervisor a star? - was he born under a lucky star? - is he related or married to anyone in the department? - does he have a research grant? - did he fast-track his PhD? - does he have a research grant? - is he willing to move 60 times before he finally gets a job where can stay? - does he have a research grant? One final question -- does he have a research grant?