
My Life with the Physics Dream Team - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/my-life-with-the-physics-dream-team
======
laingc
When I read HN, I sometimes feel that I must be the only person in the world
who really liked my PhD. Doing one was by far the best life choice I have ever
made. It not not gave me much practical knowledge that has formed the bedrock
of my career, but it deeply enriched my mental life and gave me perspective on
so many problems.

I did a very "traditional" English-style PhD in Applied Mathematics. I had a
supervisor who helped me pick a topic, and gave me just the right amount of
supervision. I was under no pressure to publish, and my scholarship did not
require me to teach. I spent my days thinking about problems, being
frustrated, experiencing small successes, experiencing small failures,
managing my time, mismanaging my time, feeling completely inadequate, and
slowly becoming an independent researcher.

Yes, my Doctoral studies were undertaken in an ideal situation, supported as I
was by friends, my department, my supervisor, and most of all my family, but I
can't believe that I am in such a minority.

~~~
kkylin
I had a very similar experience with my PhD (also in applied mathematics),
though my advisor basically let me pick my own problem to work on, which turns
out to be a very tough thing to do.

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gech
"'Why? Because the Ph.D. system grinds people down'?

Yes, and it’s completely inappropriate for what most people need. It was
designed for German academics in the 19th century and it was fine for that.
But for any other kind of life, it’s totally wrong. It takes far too long. It
forces you to pretend to be a researcher when most people don’t want to be
researchers. It’s become a union card and I think it’s highly disruptive,
particularly bad for women. For women to waste five or 10 years of their lives
is more of a disaster than it is for men."

Anyone with relation to PhD programs care to reflect on this?

~~~
scott_s
I have a PhD in computer science. I work as a Research Staff Member at IBM
Research. I mostly agree.

One of the problems with the PhD system is that individuals have to carve out
something that is _theirs_ , they _own_ it. That becomes their dissertation.
It doesn't sound terrible said like that, but the most productive work I've
ever done was after I graduated and got a job. A small group of people with
equal ownership of a problem and solution can be so much more productive. The
requirement that a student defend a body of work that is theirs disincentives
them from doing, what I think, is the most productive kind of work that leads
to the best research outcomes.

You _can_ work in productive groups in grad school, but you still need to find
that part of the work that you can claim ownership of. Because if you don't,
you won't graduate. This means that inevitably, you're going to have to think
in terms of "what do I need to do to get the hell out of here" rather than
"what's the best way we can solve this problem."

~~~
Retric
This depends on the program, some are happy to use a set of joint publications
as a defacto dissertation. Basically, several smaller chunks are used to
represent a larger body of work, which allows for closer collaboration.

~~~
physicsyogi
When I finished my physics Ph.D. in 2005, my advisor showed me his
dissertation. It was literally five papers with a cover around it. He
graduated in 1985.

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yummyfajitas
When I was at Rutgers, Dyson once came to give a talk. Most of the time when
someone very famous comes and gives a talk, they try and give a talk in the
general style of TED talks - light on content, big on catchy insightful
seeming phrases.

The entire department showed up to the mathematical physics seminar that week.
Everyone besides the math physicists was very disappointed when Dyson gave a
talk about some semiconductor crystals he really liked, together with their
energy band diagrams. No "meaning of life", no discussion of free will, just a
clever math trick for understanding a particular kind of crystal.

It was one of the very few famous guy talks I really enjoyed (the other was
Stephen Wolfram).

~~~
macintux
That reminds me of Feynman's story about giving a talk to a HS physics club
under a fake name, so that it wouldn't be overwhelmed by people who simply
came to see a Nobel laureate, just people interested in physics.

------
jayajay
"That’s why [Feynman] had a hard time communicating"

This is surprising! I always thought old Feynman was a great communicator, but
then again, the Feynman he's talking about is a young, determined Feynman, not
an old, passive Feynman...

"...we didn’t have anything to learn from [Einstein] and he probably felt the
same way about us."

Also, a bit surprising.

"Cooper had this idea that superconductivity had something to do with pairs of
electrons and Oppenheimer said that was total rubbish."

Just, wow.

"Biology is moving very fast and so the same kind of people who became
physicists in those days now tend to become biologists."

"First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was
when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap."

This article is fucking dope and you should read it. Thanks for posting this,
dude.

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mangodrunk
>Do you need to be willing to risk your reputation and pursue crazy ideas? Is
that what leads to great breakthroughs?

>>First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was
when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if
you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s
impossible to think outside the box. I was in the lucky position of jumping
into physics without ever having taken any courses in physics. I’d only been a
pure mathematician up to that point.

>Is the great scientist also naturally subversive?

>>Yes, undoubtedly. You’ve got to destroy what exists in order to build
something new. You need good taste, of course. If you destroy
indiscriminately, it doesn’t help at all. That’s where intuition comes in—what
parts of the old building should be taken down.

>Is physics a young person’s game? It seems that most great discoveries are
made by people under 40 or even under 30.

>>That is true in theoretical physics. Experimenters can keep going much
longer and sometimes stay very productive into old age. That’s a very
different game. For theoretical physics, I suppose you need to be ignorant.
After a while, you get so attached to things as they are.

I find this pretty fascinating. I was wondering why people who make something
really impressive tend to not repeat that, or they basically only make
variations on the original. Be they musician, painter, composer,
mathematician, scientist, computer scientist, etc. It's not true for all, but
it does seem to describe many successful people. Though, they already made one
great feat, so it makes sense for there to just be one.

~~~
mikhailfranco
"A genius is someone who has two good ideas"

------
guiambros
This is just beautiful:

" _First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was
when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if
you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s
impossible to think outside the box._ "

Great article, thanks for posting.

~~~
mikhailfranco
Yes, it is so important to separate research and teaching, they are completely
and utterly different in approach, skills, personality and philosophy.

A teacher should be primarily reading research in teaching, with research in
the domain as a secondary hobby. Spending an hour filling 15 rolling
blackboards with chalk squiggles has long outlived its usefulness and
effectiveness.

As a rare example of an inspired researcher and pragmatic theorist of teaching
for physics, I would name David Hestenes.

------
thefalcon
Why are Dyson's views on climate change left out of the transcript? I
understand it's not complete and word for word, but it seems like a rather
large point, and leaving it out does nothing to dispel Dyson's claim that the
media really distorts reporting on the subject of climate change.

------
Jun8
"First of all, it helps to be ignorant. The time when I did my best work was
when I was most ignorant. Knowing too much is a great handicap. Especially if
you’ve been teaching for some years, things get so fixed in your mind and it’s
impossible to think outside the box."

For me, this is the most important piece in the interview (but what a man! As
he himself comments to be so lucid as a 90+ year-old famous scientist is very
rare).

A recurrent "if I were a rich man" fantasy of mine is to build a platform
where people from very different disciplines would come together and discuss
open problems in one discipline, something similar to a TED talk but spending
2-3 weeks on one problem. 99.9% of the ideas generated by the non-experts will
be BS, but if the remainder is non-zero, it would be worth it.

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abecedarius
Dyson's _Disturbing the Universe_ is one of the most interesting memoirs I've
read. Startuppy types ought to like the story of General Atomics starting with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA) as
a summer project, and that was just one chapter.

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euyyn
It's the first time I hear of a physicist saying he rather QM and GR never be
reconciled! :)

~~~
AstralStorm
That comes with being a grumpy old man.

My money is on both being replaced by something quite completely different.
(much like with old Newtonian physics)

