Freedom of Science

4 Responses to “Chores of scientists”  

1. 1 Carl Brannen Sep 17th, 2007 at 1:45 am

   When I left academia in ‘83, the internet did not exist in its present form, and it was not possible for me to continue working on physics. I am certain that if the internet didn’t exist I would not have gotten back into it (as an heretical amateur).

   Furthermore, even if I had gotten back into it, I would have been much more difficult to find collaborators. Overall, I think the effect of arXiv and the internet in general is to break the hold that academics had on science. I can see us returning to a condition where the theoretical sciences (the things that do not require money support, but instead require devoted lovers of the subject) are again dominated by amateurs.

2. 2 Pioneer1 Sep 17th, 2007 at 9:36 pm

   Thanks for the comment. I like libraries and I used extensively both New York Public Library and Columbia libraries even after I had access to the Internet. I could find any information I wanted between the two. True, the Internet made it easier to find information. This book about the Cavendish experiment is now easily available on Google Books. It is a useful book because it has footnotes explaining Cavendish’s method to modern readers. It is a little harder to locate it in a library.

   I also try to put original documents online that are still protected by corporations such as literature about the Cavendish experiment. All these will be available eventually to everyone. And you make a lot of complicated physics concepts that physicists publish in their own closed language available to general public in understandable format in your blog. Before the Internet this could have been achieved only by publishing a pamphlet to a limited audience.

   Besides the Internet the personal computer revolution was another event softening the hold of privileged professionals having access to powerful computers. So both availability of information and processing of information became much cheaper and available to amateurs.

   I see similarities with Galileo’s time when amateurs flourished but I also see differences. Some related questions here.

3. 3 Carl Brannen Sep 17th, 2007 at 10:18 pm

   I appreciate your compliment “you make a lot of complicated physics concepts that physicists publish in their own closed language available to general public in understandable format in your blog.”

   But my motivation for doing this is suspicious. I’m not trying to educate people in the standard model, but instead my slant on it. That said, I believe I could write a book describing the standard model using standard physics that would be easier to understand than any of the textbooks out there.

   Sometimes I feel that academics get points for making things more complicated than they need to. My stuff has math that is pretty complicated in it. Unfortunately, that is the minimum necessary to make QFT calculations with spin. There is a book written by Feynman that is a level below mine. Instead of QFT, it covers QED, which is the simplest QFT used. He wrote the book without anything more complicated than addition, to the best of my recollection, and yet it explains things that I think many physics grad students do not know:
   QED: The Strange Theory of Matter and Light

   The problem with physics grad school is that the math is so difficult that students have very little time to contemplate and study the foundations of the theory. The QED book fills some of those gaps.

1. 1 Physics canon is immutable at Freedom of Science Pingback on Sep 24th, 2007 at 6:28 pm