Sean Carroll comes very close in this post to vindicating an outsider’s view of physics profession and physics professionals. But he falls short of applying scientific reasoning to the profession itself since he is an insider, the way a cosmologist cannot know the cosmos, so let me help.
Here are the numbers. Universities spew out twice as much physics PhD as there are jobs for them. Are you now wondering why physicists are the lowest paid professionals in the world? A physicist studies Newton’s laws and earns a starting salary of less than $30,000 if he can find a job. A law student studies Roman law for a few years and earns a starting salary of over $160,000. Law firms fight among each other to grab each and every graduate. After all both are law students. If you like law why go into Newtonian law. Just study corporate law and be rich.
In any case, physicists themselves are the victim of the professional physics propaganda that is perpetuated in the media about heroic theoretical discoveries by physicists. They are recruited into the profession by this propaganda. Behind the glamorous facade there is the ugly physics hierarchy as strict as the Vatican and the military. This hierarchy is like the famous Higgs field but as the physics student swims upwards in this hierarchy she gains not mass but authority. After two decades of learning a useless legal language called physics the doctoral candidate gets his license to practice and starts looking for a job to do data reduction or at best to work on some obscure topic defined and paid for by the military. What happened to the promised fundamentally heroic discoveries? They don’t exist. So the disillusioned physicist after two decades of studying legal Newtonist religion in all its incarnations and becoming a secular priest of Newtonism becomes a chauvinist bureaucrat defending Newton’s 18th century religious ideologies as science.
The picture of scholastic physics described here by an insider under the guise of giving advice reveals that physics is another name of the old hierarchical bureaucracy called scholasticism. The advice to the new members of this bureaucracy is simple: if you want to advance in this hierarchy you must conform.
Physicists are employed by the scholastic corporation and they must abide by company rules. The corporation outlives any physicist and no physicist can change the corporation. If they do not conform physicists will be out and unemployed.
Also take a look at this table showing the similarities between physics and the Church.
What Dr. Carroll proves in this post is that physics is an organism. He recognizes that there is a bureaucracy and there is a hierarchy. Physicists are professionals who must move up the hierarchy continuously or drop out. How? He doesn’t say. I’ll tell you. The currency of academic physics hierarchy is authority.
Physics is not structured like minor-league/intercollegiate-sports system. Physics is structured like the military and the Catholic church.
Law, the medicine, the military, the church and physics are hierarchical bureaucracies based on an absolute respect to rank and seniority. Anyone who even thinks of questioning authority is pushed out of the brotherhood. Excommunication in physics is as real as excommunication in the church. Science on the other hand is defined as questioning authority.
Any climber in the hierarchy who reaches academic bottlenecks with less authority appropriate for her rank and seniority will be told as Dr. Carroll nicely put it “you have passed your sell-by date, no more jobs for you.” Just like in the military.
I am glad that now there is a verification by an insider that physics is a rotten unhuman organism feeding on human intelligence.
Why is this relevant?
- Proposition: Similar organisms behave the same way
If the physics profession has an architecture which is identical to the architecture of the Catholic church, that is, a hierarchical bureaucracy based on sanctity of rank and authority then both practitioners will behave exactly the same. And they do, as I’ve written yesterday.
Compared to Hollywood Academic physics is fringe entertainment.
So, physicists who are reading this what do you think?
‘… They are recruited into the profession by this propaganda. Behind the glamorous facade there is the ugly physics hierarchy as strict as the Vatican and the military. … Can independent science come out of this police state called academia? Members of the academic hierarchy must obey the laws of the system otherwise they will be excommunicated. Freeing science from the grip of this police state is important. …’
If you actually look at police states fo comparison, such as Stalin’s and Hitler’s enterprises, you’ll find that they claimed to be defending something from evil ignorant propaganda.
But the biggest thing you need to be aware of is that nearly everyone loved Hitler until 1939. Hence Britain’s Prime Minister Chamberlain flying to Munich in September 1938 to have tea and cakes with the great fascist.
Nobody – especially the world’s free media bosses – wanted a war with a guy who was eliminating German employment, fencing off the ghettos, building the first motorways, getting Germany back on its feet after military defeat and financial chaos.
The same occurred with Stalin – who murdered many more people than Hitler in purges – and his successors during the Cold War. I don’t believe that Soviet dictatorial ‘communism’ collapsed – it failed because America in the Reagan had the balls to stand up to it and call it the ‘evil empire’ despite the screams of a lot of [people] who believed that dictatorial communism was holy writ and nuclear deterrence should be banned.
Taking these lessons over to the physics establishment, you have to realise that Woit and Smolin are fellow travellers of mainstream orthodoxy. They’re certainly not radical enough in the right directions to make substantial progress, or to be leaders of a scientific revolution that will firmly destroy the hysterical groupthink religion of Witten’s M-theory. They’re more like Prime Minister Chamberlain, having tea and cakes with the great dictator at Munich in September 1939, trying to win by getting a ‘promise to be a good boy from now on’ signed on a worthless scrap of paper.
E.g., here’s a mildly sarcastic comment of mine which Woit – aged 51 now (Smolin is even older) deleted from his Not Even Wrong blog:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=955#comment-44326
October 7th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Shantanu,
I think it’s time Edward Witten received Nobel’s explosive accolade for explaining that string remarkably predicts gravity in his paper:
Reflections on the Fate of Spacetime, in Physics Today, April 1996:
‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’
“The same occurred with Stalin – who murdered many more people than Hitler in purges – and his successors during the Cold War”
Can you cite your source of this information please?
Or if you will contact me via mail, as this is a scientific blog.
“Soviet dictatorial ‘communism’ ”
The soviet economic system is called socialism and not communism. With the above request, please include the sources that prove that USSR was a dicatorial state.
Don’t you find it rather “propagandistic” to write antisoviet comments in a scientific blog?
PS. I would also ask you to check at the level of scholarization in the Soviet Union and compare it with the rest of the modern European states and USA.
Dear Spyros and Nige,
I agree with Spyros and I want to keep this a scientific blog. It was my mistake to include that quote comparing academia to police state and thanks for Nige for escalating the analogy which made it clear to me that it is an exaggeration. So I deleted that reference. I won’t delete the comments because physics unfortunately has a political component but please no more political comments here. Let’s get back to science. Thank you.
Dear Zeynel,
apart from your comments above (with which i agree obviously) your original post is entirely political.
You wrote however that “physics unfortunately has a political component”. And i wish to comment on that. Physics has as much a political component as all other sciences do. And this is because physicists are not alienated creatures but are part of the society.
Maybe you intented to write that physics has an ideological component. This however is not directly connected to politics (although politics is indeed influenced by philosophy). And it is not “unfortunate”. It’s just the way it is.
Thanks for hosting my comments
Why does this remind me of the band “Reel Big Fish” singing “Don’t Start A band”? Or a professor saying, “Do Not study Computers or physics.. I’m glad the mischievious monkey in me is conditioned to ignore it..