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Physicist Peter Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Higgs, the physicist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, says he doubts any university would give him a job today. Higgs says universities wouldn't consider him productive enough — though the papers he published were important and of high quality, he didn't have the volume necessary for serious consideration in today's competitive employment environment. 'He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.' His comments highlight the absurdity of the current system for finding researchers in academia. How many researchers of Higgs' caliber have been turned down for similar reasons?"
That ruins tenure.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't publish much and I'm no longer in academia.
Do universities keep these low-productive layabouts around just because they might turn out to be producing Nobel Prize caliber work? And should taxpayers be on the hook for their rather substantial salaries (tenured professors are paid substantially more than software engineers in the US) when they don't produce much?
That's the way it is. Keep the research papers churning, regardless of how utter crap they are, and more importantly keep the research grants flowing.
I remember the BBC did a programme a few years ago asking why people are so sceptical about science these days. This is exactly why.
Doing actually good research takes a lot of time. It is a sure way to not get tenure or to not even being considered for a position in the first place. It starts with your PhD taking longer than the ones of the streamlined cretins that never will have a deep though in their whole career. Academic research is pretty much dead at this time, what is being done is industrial research on the cheap and often with very low quality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Go to most science and engineering departments in the U.S. today, and you'll find senior faculty members sitting on P&T (promotion and tenure) committees who would never qualify for tenure if they were judged by the same standards they apply to junior faculty. You'll meet assistant professors who've published more journal papers in two years (and brought in more research money) than a full professor has done in his entire career, while being told it isn't good enough by the P&T committee.
That double standard is not lost on the younger faculty, nor does not make them happy. To add insult to injury, the younger faculty generally tend to be better teachers, as well. It is a topsy-turvy world where the people in charge are often the least qualified of anyone there.
I've always said it, but now we have it from a noble prize winner
"He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed."
"Peter Higgs, the physicist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics"
Actually he shared the price with François Englert who (at least) equally worked on the boson.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Making sure someone is constantly busy in any intellectual field is a sure-fire way to kill any hope of creativity. The best ideas often come from moments when you can just clear your head completely or just play around with ideas on your own without worrying about your productivity. Modern society seems to have forgotten this.
Happy people make bad consumers.
The problem is not science research. The problem and one which can be solved is that we have a pyramid in the research community. Thousands of low wage postdocs doing the grunt work for a small number of people that have tenure. And very very few of those postdocs if anything make it into a position when they gain access to tenure. And if that's the case they have to wait decades to get it. Now think to how things were 100-80-70 years ago. The pyramid was much less skewed, and young post docs actually had a good chance of gaining tenure after a normal length of time. :)
The corrective measure is not to increase producing thousands of insignificant research papers, but actually limit those that can enter into a science career. Make the exams very difficult, pick the brightest of the brightest. Give postdocs positions to them. Of course you must pay them accordingly so no more slave wages. And then within 10-15 years grant them tenure. And for God's sake send them into retirement when they get to 65-70 years of age.
Can politics accept such a situation ? The answer is left to the reader.
At my alma mater, even doctoral students are required to publish so many papers before they will be considered for awarding a Ph.D. Most research universities anymore are just paper mills for the paid research journals and money factories for the administration.
They tried to convince me to get a PhD after I got my MS, but I ran like hell from that place after seeing what it was really about. I honestly don't know why anyone would get a Ph.D. today. It only limits your career opportunities and doesn't give you much benefit.
I've often wondered lately if there are enough dissatisfied PhD-dropouts and overworked junior professors that if we got together, we could start a new college and directly compete against these attitudes (both the problems with professors and research, and the problems with the student curriculum and lack of teaching enthusiasm in general). I am quite seriously interested in doing exactly this if I could build up a coalition and some funding.
as keep churning out papers environment is not a place to be learning hands on skills from people who have done the work in that in environment it may be a TA reading out of the book.
Bullshit publishing is just part of the larger problem. We've displaced labor through technology. Neither central planning nor the free market has come up with a really good solution. The transition of a BS degree into the "new high school diploma" is part of this too. This is a quasi-free market solution. At first blush, it looks like the free market is demanding more education; but the educational establishment is subsidized by the government.
To be fair, superfluous education and bullshit papers are better than sending these young people off as cannon fodder. It's still not satisfying though.
yet we fail to utilize our spiritual centerpeace sync with creation little miss dna momkind, relying on chemicals & 'alterations' to be ok external as hell. never a better time to free the innocent stem cells etc... healthcare.love,,, see you there
I am a tenured full professor at a mid-to-leading rank European
university. I work each day for several hours on ideas I consider interesting, publishing
if the results seem useful. I also take seriously my teaching duties (mostly low level courses that no one else wants).
However I refuse to play office politics or participate in advancing the careers of others (like writing articles for them). And while this excludes any possibility of promotion it is a fair trade-off for having the peace and tranquility required to research difficult ideas.
So problems that Higgs mentions exist also at lower levels. Either you play their game or else you get shunted out.
Why don't he open his own research lab or join cern?
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ... Since we began with a cosmological analogy, let us return to one now. An unfortunate space traveler, falling into a black hole, is utterly and irretrievably doomed, but that is only obvious to the space traveler. In the perception of an observer hovering above the event horizon, the space traveler's time slows down, so that it seems as if catastrophe can forever be put off into the future. Something like that has happened in our research universities. The good times ended forever around 1970, but by importing students, and employing Ph.D's as temporary postdocs, we have stretched time out, pretending that nothing has changed, waiting for the good times to return. We have about as much chance as the space traveler. ..."
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science [due in part to continuing exponential growth that was soon to end]. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The jury is still out on the utility of Higgs' research. And that's what the public uses as a metric. His work and that at the LHC may turn out to be nothing more than pure research. Or we may develop antigravity and finally get our flying cars. The problem is that the public will only use the latter result as a sign of success. And there is no way to predict a 'useful' outcome a priori of some research.
We do it because it will expand our collective knowledge and, if we are lucky, provide the occasional payoff.
Have gnu, will travel.
http://www.kastekneturu.com
Cause, you know... just sayin...
The man WHO PROVED that GOD lives inside a QUARK!??!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Having the freedom to fail, then to be able to analyze and think about why you failed is one of the most important methods of learning. When you succeed , you really don't spend the time to analyze why, but you sure do when you fail.
In today's world, the importance of failure is not understood.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
So by your method, we'd select for good test takers, and exclude people with brilliant flashes of insight.
I suspect you would support rigorous testing and tracking in school, and to the extent that genetics plays a factor, we could simply select among children at, say, age 5, keep the ones who will be productive workers in menial jobs (Perhaps microchipping or marking them in some way), keep the ones who will be geniuses (I'm sure you would have been in that group) and put them in special schools. the menial workers would be maintained in growth and training facilities and given appropriate job skills according to physical characteristics as they develop: big and strong can become package handlers, well spoken and attractive can be waiters and news readers. Oh, and the ones who don't fit those two buckets (menials and scholars) we'll just use as part of a modest proposal for a solution to the need for increased protein in diets of factory farmed fish and animals.
It's unbelievably idiotic and absurd... until you consider human nature.
The people above you are incompetent (cf. "Peter Principle") and will latch onto anything that they can use to judge you to avoid appearing as the incompetents that they are. Even when it makes no sense from an analytical point of view. We humans seem to be hardwired to avoid (being perceived to be, or actually) being wrong. (The book's also pretty good!)
Anyway, hope it wasn't too traumatic :).
HAND.
where money is the main criteria for any action, many things can and do go wrong. In particular when continuing exponential growth processes run by humans happen in a closed system with limited non-renewable resources.
Most universities would kill for the chance to hire Higgs just for the name recognition. It attracts students and their tuition money. Hire him, give him tenure & a decent office, and have him teach Physics 105 and host a few nice public seminars.
The system isn't designed to support outliers - no one in the auto industry complains that they are having Ph.Ds design cars using CFD simulations and a lot of technical know-how. Would Ford have been able to start an automotive company and be challenging today? These moments of individual brilliance changing a field are few and far between. The entire system is geared towards improving the average, rather than gambling on the outliers.
Another differences is that the nature of research has changed as well (at least in the engineering side). Even a brilliant researcher requires massive computational facilities, expensive equipment, and a lot of programming. So they hire grad students and supervise them, which needs grant money. To convince your sponsors that they are getting their moneys worth, you need a lot of publications. If the sponsorship mentality is - "see what you can do, we aren't going to be looking at publication count", things would be quite different. But can you imagine the outrage if an academic gets a one million dollar grant and turns out one paper on the effect of honey-bees on rainfall or some such topic? The NSF is being held up as a political punching bag. Everyone is in a CYA mentality. Not the "try your best, and if it doesn't work we will still stand behind you because we want to cultivate an environment of innovation." mode.
You get what you measure for.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Isn't this what impact factor metrics like the H-index (and improved versions) are designed to address? Those take into account the "quality" of a given paper, as measured by its citation count, as well as the number of papers (productivity). Of course, the citation count may not be an accurate measure of quality, I guess. It's probably simplistic, but certainly better than just counting papers published.
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
Universities have long favored quantity of quality. One only needs to look at their recent graduates to figure that out.
while working in the patent office...
I don't know. Global Warming is based on some fairly common sense.
This is why people migrate from one region to another, and have done so for millions of years of human history and pre-history.
You hang out in one place for a while, and the population builds up, and the piles of shit and garbage become unmanageable. So you go someplace new. When there's enough people, and nowhere else to go, because you've covered the entire face of the fininte sphere that is the earth, you know you have to start managing your pollution. Thomas Malthus came up with a theory that many people thought was common sense at the time. Ultimately, he was right, even though he didn't forsee things like the Haber Bosch process giving us an extra century and a half of food production and geometric population growth. But in-fact, our industrial waste was already beginning to change the climate of the entire planet.
It is not common sense to believe that you can infinitely fill a finite container. It is "magical thinking", at best. Selfish opportunism at worst.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The shock troops of the 1%ers are the universities.
Congrats on 'forgetting' that Higgs shares this discovery with François Englert. Entry written by chauvinist Englishman?
what?
this isn't education that you're describing here...that's not how "teaching" works
the goal isn't to "do what the teachers says" or "get a good grade"
the purpose is **to learn the subject & to think independently**
we all know what tests are for...to test our knowledge of a subject...verification of learning
if the test doesn't measure what is being taught (health) and instead only measures something abstract then ***it is fully the teachers fault that the student got a bad grade***
this is fully on the teacher for being a bad educator
Thank you Dave Raggett
yes for sure, but there's much more to identify, b/c if you "follow the money" it leads to some interesting places...
for the government...Most of the research grants come from R&D for a specific project (ex: DARPA, a vaccine) or the NSF (ex: archaeology, astronomy, CS, etc)
the government, at least in the US, is another way of saying "the voters"....the US has had enough people fall for the "Austerity" charade that virtually every public university, including the two that employed me, cut their budgets b/c the **STATE** budget was being cut artificially.
Here's a headline from 2011, "Indiana state government unearths $320 million in unknown tax revenue" http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/09/politics/indiana-missing-money/
2011 is **the same year all State Universities went on a hiring freeze**...Including mine, Ball State University
It's *****ALL BULLSHIT POLITICS******
Thank you Dave Raggett
Most of the research papers I see today are vacuous - they find a correlation between two things, do not establish any causation, and say "this is will require more research" at the end. Anyone who needs to publish seems to churn these out.
Lots of people here seem confused about how academics are evaluated. I sit on on tenure and promotion committees and lots of awards committees. I have seen many cases where someone with fewer, but better, publications wins out over someone with lots of publications. The people who evaluate these things are not idiots. They're usually carefully selected to be knowledgeable about research in the candidate's area. Even if they're not, then they rely on external evaluations from experts. The system is not as broken as most people here think.
There really is no better proof than a practical use. It is basically large scale replication of one of the experiments supporting the theory. Even better if these are experiments that would not have been run otherwise.
I just got a more senior researcher ask me that I cite his (irrelevant) paper. Citations are often like reviews: people are likely to cite/accept papers of people they know. And it sucks.
I attended grad school during the early 90s and left ADB, but with a Master's. Went into the software industry (video games, defense, etc.) and made good money, but have ended up in a Ph.D. program at a top-20 university, working at a research institution getting paid more than I made in industry, while being allowed to do my dissertation on a topic I've studied for years, which would never have a chance of getting funded under a grant because it's too blue-sky. I brought my own funding for the degree, so advisors were more willing to entertain "out there" ideas and let me work on exactly what I want to (not much risk to them). As it stands, I will probably end up with Ph.D. research that gets a lot of attention in my field once I'm done because other students can't afford to work on such risky (and promising) subjects. Other students are doing research here that they have to because that's what they're grants require them to work on.
I realize that other disciplines (Physics, Biology, etc.) require large amounts of money for research, and my discipline is different in that it doesn't (CS), but I do think that doing things normally (postdoc, tenure track, etc.) isn't so productive these days. I know many poor, miserable postdocs who will never have a tenured position, and I know many tenured professors who aren't that happy.
I wonder: why is everyone wanting a tenured professor job? Maybe the promising research is going to come from people who don't follow the traditional route.
Perhaps the Nobel Committee is dead wrong! Higgs is a Hippy Bum and unworthy!
Now, his former University and a lot others can go after him for fraud and try to get a piece of the Nobel Prize money.
"Release the Kraken!"
It could take a long, long time before something is found to be useful. People have been studying prime numbers for a few millenia but it's only when computers came out that they attained rockstar popularity in the real world. The rest of mumber theory may have little direct use, but without a massive pile of those "useless" theorems and a bunch of very talented people who have explored the field so thoroughly you won't have good reason to believe that RSA does what it does. There are researchers who focus on practical research, but those can only be done on top of the soil of deep and broad fundamental research. Without fundamental research the practical guys would run out of ideas to exploit.
A paper of the current paper system might be a good paper!
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.
In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.
The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists. "For the most part, I don't think departments are looking to grow their particle physics programs," he says.
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_08_29/caredit.a1300185
An unsatisfactory contract policy
This will be difficult for LD staff to cope with. Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career
http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy
Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. [...] Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties.
In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.
http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-students-and-fellows-missing-staff
And finally, a warning to non-western members about values at CERN:
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]
source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report
ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264
You've covered a lot of ground in your hand-waving paragraph that tries to explain Global Warming. Also 'ultimately he was right' isn't a penetrating review of Malthusian-ism, which is still an unsettled theory. Really.
I with your last paragraph about 'common sense' but not in the sense that you want, because common sense isn't science.
I got lured into doing a PhD degree in the 90s and found out this ugly reality. Quantity over quality. I finished it as fast as I could and never looked back again. I personally won't recommend anyone doing a PhD. It is much more important to gain real life experience outside academics. You always have time to go back to academics if you wish to.
If scientists are actually dealing with problems on the edge of science ,all year round, I don't think it's asking too much to publish at least one paper per year. May not have Higgins boson discovery impact though, but surely they ought to discover or confirm something different and new.
How about this:
A paper cites others. Others cite the paper.The number of a paper being cited will be divided by the number of cites in the paper. The quotient will be what counts.
Now no points in cite trading.
Nothing of value can be achieved because it's not like it was back in the good old days? Oldfartism.
He's right. The academic "career path" I experienced was like this: undergrad gets you curious, 3 (in theory... in practice more like 6) glorious years immersed deep in study while living of cheap instant noodles in a dingy share-house gets you completely hooked (and, coincidentl,y a PhD), before a decade or so in research crushes your passion with ruthless abandon (and many grant proposals) and turns you into either a manager or an escapee into the "real" world.
Just one more reason we can begin services for science. It died at the beginning of the 21st century. I feel very sorry for budding scientists; they missed the best.
The larger issue is that academic departments have largely outsourced the evaluation of their faculty's research. They rely almost exclusively on bureaucratic measures. This is one symptom.
David Parnas also has criticized the trend in his "Stop the numbers game" article
I've slept on a junky bed in the cold in my life too (during winter in Pittsburgh with a 40 minute slog through the snow each way to CMU where I was hanging out at the robotics institute, not able to afford to pay for much heat). I think you missed my point, or I obviously was not clear enough about it. Remember, this is in the context of a Nobel prize-winning scientist saying no one would hire him if he were starting today. The original poster says he or she needs a degree (at great personal cost) to make a difference in the world (including to make a meaningful life from that by contributing to science). I point out how I got a fancy degree and it really does not help that much in doing meaningful work. It certainly could have helped me make a lot of money most likely hurting other people in some monopolistic/cronyistic way (like via the FIRE sector of the economy where lots of Princeton grads go), but I was not into that way of life.
As for science, ignoring most colleges flunk out half their freshman class ultimately, consider this:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
If you want to make a difference in the world or even just in your own life, you have to just go out and do something of healthy value to the world (or at least yourself). But that is not what much of academia claims and the original poster seems to feel that he or she is being scammed by academia but can do nothing about it Thus the cake (diploma) is a lie (in many cases). I know -- I got a good piece of that "cake", but it still wasn't very filling or very healthy. Did it have some benefits? Sure. But it is also quite possible I would have done better in life without college (and especially pursuing grad school) at all, because they were great opportunity costs, great financial costs, and such experiences were also in many ways disempowering.
Or for a different perspective, words from someone who chose to become a carpet cleaner to have a good interesting life:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030206110440/http://www.unconventionalideas.com/bstcarer.html
"...
The point is that as a professional carpet cleaner, I don't need to look very far for challenge and stimulation. No, the work isn't easy, and can be physically demanding, but as you will gather from my descriptions, it isn't all repetitive drudgery either.
Many people get misled when seeking a career. They turn their backs on work which is supposedly beneath the ability o
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The Big Crunch by David Goodstein: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.