
Physicist Fotini Markopoulou traded quantum gravity for industrial design - sasvari
http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/this-physics-pioneer-walked-away-from-it-all
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joaorico
To use Lee Smolin's (her ex-husband) terminology [1], she was clearly a Seer,
not a Crafstperson.

The Seers-Craftspeople problem is not unlike the innovator's dilemma and the
big-corp/startup. The Perimeter, of all places, was about fostering Seers.
Einstein is the canonical Seer, and it is generally accepted that Einstein
today would have been, at the beginning of his career, even less welcomed by
the scientific community (before his 1905 papers, he was unable to secure
several faculty positions, etc, went to work in the patent office).

Maybe Milner/Zuck can come up with something to help fund the Seers, à la
startup incubator, thinking long-term, in the sense that 1 successful unicorn
in a portfolio of 100 would be worth it, and you could have 15+ years to think
without any pressure to publish.

Apparently the odds of finding some at the Perimeter have diminished in the
last few years.

Maybe YC/Thiel/Musk want to take up this challenge, à la OpenAI.

Maybe hope lies in guaranteed basic income. (À la Buchheit: "we don't need
more jobs, we need more Steve Jobs.")

[1] Smolin, Lee - The Trouble with Physics, Chapter 18 "Seers and
Craftspeople"

~~~
joaorico
I'm using Smolin's terminology because he was defending Seers in his book, is
Markopoulos' ex-husband and colleague, and a central piece at the Perimeter.
From his book, cited above (the whole chapter is very much worth reading):

"Master craftspeople and seers come to science for different reasons. Master
craftspeople go into science because, for the most part, they have discovered
in school that they’re good at it. They are usually the best students in their
math and physics classes from junior high school all the way up to graduate
school, where they finally meet their peers. They have always been able to
solve math problems faster and more accurately than their classmates, so
problem solving is what they tend to value in other scientists.

Seers are very different. They are dreamers. They go into science because they
have questions about the nature of existence that their schoolbooks don’t
answer. If they weren’t scientists, they might be artists or writers or they
might end up in divinity school. It is only to be expected that members of
these two groups misunderstand and mistrust each other.

[...]

Of course, some people are mixtures of both. No one makes it through graduate
school who is not highly competent on the technical side. But the majority of
theoretical physicists I know fall into one or the other group."

~~~
joaorico
Smolin actually singles out Markopoulou as one of the great modern Seers (in
the same chapter):

"It is easy to list those whose thinking has led to papers and even books
addressing foundational issues: Roger Penrose is perhaps the best known to the
public, but one can name many others including John Baez, Louis Crane, Bryce
DeWitt, Fay Dowker, Christopher Isham, Fotini Markopoulou, Carlo Rovelli,
Rafael Sorkin, and Gerard ’t Hooft."

~~~
theoh
I see Nathan Myhrvold (who published a lavish technical cookbook) isn't on
that list.

It shouldn't be a big deal when someone decides to step back from working on
abstract algebraic models of highly constrained physical systems (Feynman's
"creativity in a straightjacket") to working on the more human task of design.

Design is fascinating, but it's all about putting yourself in someone else's
shoes. What does the user want? Why should the user have to do X at this
point? It's different and it exercises different parts of the mind from
theoretical physics. It's a lot more natural for humans.

Cryptographic protocol design is IMO the closest thing in CS to
product/service design in the corporate/engineering world. There you have
formal proofs and formal breaches in security, but everything hinges on
implicatures and difficult-to-formalise expectations of what the protocol is
intended to achieve.

The architect Zaha Hadid apparently studied math at university before
switching to architecture. She's a controversial figure (also a woman) and her
architectural achievements were absolutely from an imaginative rather than a
mechanical part of her personality.

As for "Seers and Craftspeople", if you replace those words with "Visionaries"
and "Mechanics", you're in danger of reproducing the already widespread
prejudices in Western society about intelligence and human worth. It starts to
sound like normative vs positive, prescriptive vs descriptive, which is, like
all binaries, a bit divisive.

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maverick_iceman
If you look at her Inspirehep page, she has a citation count of 1193 only [1].
For someone who got a PhD in 1998, that's definitely below par. Also her major
work is on causal dynamical approaches to quantum gravity - an endeavor not
with many successes and currently not considered to be very fruitful by most
high energy physicists. I don't think she would have been able to get tenure
in any major research university.

[1]
[http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/F.Markopoulou.1](http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/F.Markopoulou.1)

~~~
faitswulff
So this article is no longer interesting if she's not qualified enough for
your liking, despite the fact that she's a highly educated physicist? I'm not
sure how this comment is relevant.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> She wears her hair in a tousled pixie-cut, and on this spring day, a green
knit sweater and blue scarf with a pattern of fish-like scales.

Ah, alright. I was wondering what she was wearing.

(is your sarcasm detector working?)

~~~
elcritch
And some people, like myself, enjoy a bit of non-technical but human details.
As in, goodness, this is a real person and maybe dealing with similar
questions in life aside from technical papers and research. Actually, from a
narrative perspective these details tie together some of the theme of the
article, that of Markopolou's approach of creativity in life and physics. As
in she's not a dour academic wearing muted colors, but having a splash of
color and texture.

------
dharma1
I think the article was fine but it was hard understand what Doppel does from
their website. So it vibrates at BPM you set?

------
i386
This puff peice is so light it's about to eminently float away on the mearest
breeze.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Really not. When you see a line like:

'He [Turok] didn’t want the institute, he says, “to be center for alternative
physicists who were doing unusual things in speculative directions.”'

you know something has gone wrong somewhere.

Because when you have no idea how to get to quantum gravity, shutting down
"unusual things in speculative direction" is pretty much guaranteed to leave
you with nothing.

~~~
budu3
On the surface it looks like her departure is a huge loss to the academic
world.

> I applauded her for her bravery for pursuing her own line, but that
> inevitably brings risks with it. She is a very fundamental thinker; she had
> original ideas. But at the end of the day you had to decide if those ideas
> are going to pan out

Why not let the broader community of scientist decide this?

~~~
jessriedel
There are finite resources for paying salaries, and people (before tenure) get
cut based on how promising their ideas are as judged by their local peers (the
tenure committee).

You can imagine an alternate system where you poll the larger community, but
this is liable to degenerate into a popularity contest as each voter spends a
tiny amount of time choosing people with whom they are not familiar. In
contrast, the tenure committee is able to invest more time looking carefully
at a single candidate.

~~~
jessriedel
It just dawned on me that I should of course disclose I work at the Perimeter
Institute. However, I actually disagree _a lot_ with Neil Turok on hiring
philosophy and what PI's priorities should be, in a way that makes me very
sympathetic toward this former physicist. But I know nothing about her actual
work (she left before I arrived), and for all I know Neil made the right
decision and it wasn't close.

