Freedom of Science

Doctors make their living by making definitions. Definitions have their own lifetime. Once a consensus is reached and a definition becomes a law it dies and ceases to change.

Many people have analyzed the classic problem of the rate of change of definitions. The origin of major socio-economic problems have been tied to out of synch changes in the rate of change of the definition and the defined. When the definition and the defined change with different rates catastrophic consequences may result. Many researchers suggested that there is a need for a Ministry of Definitions in order to maintain and update humanity’s outdated definitions.

Take the definition of the alphabet. The defined is the set of symbols called the alphabet. In this case the defined has been changing with a fast rate. Today the effective alphabet is the QWERTY keyboard. But since the definition of the alphabet has died and has zero rate of change it is still taught in schools as the “classical” alphabet.

Therefore, once a definition enters the academia and it is adopted by the professional definers called Doctors of Philosophy it starts to rust and soon becomes non-functional and dies.

The reason for this is simple: Academia is a legal system. Doctors’ profession is based on authority and measurement of authority. In order to project authority Doctors will never concede that any of their definitions was a mistake. Doctors declare all their definitions to be the latest absolute truth. This leaves no room for change. When absolute truths crash under the weight of subsequent experimental evidence Doctors simply add new amendments. Only sophisticated and sophistical scholastic Doctors of Philosophy can amend absolute truths and make them look naturally absolute once again. This academic cottage industry is called renormalization.

So, once written down, the law cannot be changed, it can only be amended. Changing a definition is a punishable crime in scholasticism. Einstein still pays the price of changing a definition he made. Scholastic Doctors never forgave Einstein for removing the cosmological constant after he defined it. So today removing and reinstating cosmological constant is a field on which PhD’s are issued. There are Doctors of Philosophy whose career consists of perpetually writing papers about cosmological constant and its place in universes. 

This legal method of amendment favors the professional Doctors and creates an intellectual mess and confuses regular folks who try to make sense of a definition. In a legal system based on amendments a single word will have multiple definitions because professional Doctors will keep adding amendments to some previously existing law. There will always be some Doctor who would try to make a name for himself by breaking the consensus and establishing a new species of meaning to an old definition. This is how scholasticism works.

Remember that Doctors make their living by making definitions. The more definitions they make the more fame and authority they obtain.

Remember that Doctors make their living by making definitions. It is worth repeating this.

So it becomes clear that there is already a Ministry of Definitions. This is the academia. The product of the Ministry of Definition is definitions. The most formal kind of definition is the academic paper.

Look at Physics. Physics is a legal system. In physics new amendments are added as new symbols to already existing equations which are called laws. That’s why physics is a spaghetti code full of amendments written in pidgin mathematics mixed with English. In addition to the equations Doctors need to use prose because basically a physics paper is a philosophical commentary on an equation. The commentary is made of principles, conjectures and opinions that the esteemed author tries to couple as well as possible to prominently displayed symbols decoratively arranged on both sides of an equality sign.

Remember that Doctors make their living by making definitions which they never update but amend. So in physics you will find hundreds of definitions of force. This is very confusing for us folks.

Remember that Doctors make their living by making definitions. So Doctors of Philosophy will keep adding new definitions of Force and make their living by defining force. Defining new species of force has paid many mortgages of many fine Doctors.

When Doctors are tired of defining force they define spacetimes. There are more spacetimes in physics than there are brands of shampoo in your favorite drugstore. Just like shampoos, the ingredients of all spacetimes are pretty much the same. There are  spacetimes with relativistic flavors. There are spacetimes with stringy flavors. There are spacetimes, just like shampoos, with no flavors or added color. The exception is that even though there are no shampoos with no shampoo in them there are spacetimes with no matter in them. This makes P&G’s marketing department a more scientific institution than your standard academic physics department. You see, Doctors make their living by making definitions. Their job is to make definitions. There is no law which says that definitions Doctors make cannot be absurd. Absurd is legal in physics. Doctors make their living by making legal definitions. The more absurd a definition is a better chance exists that the New York Times will call.

Now you see why Doctors make so many definitions. Pretend that you want to write an academic physics paper. Very easy. It is like shopping in your favorite drugstore. First choose a nice spacetime with some cool and hip flavor matching the colors of the prestigious academic institution you happen to work for. This is important. Each such high learning institution has their own spacetimes that they cling to fanatically. So a Doctor at the University of Chicago would be damned if she uses a spacetime favored in Caltech and vice versa.

After choosing your spacetime, you must sprinkle it with some philosophical discussions about background and landscape. In your preamble you must also mention a few principles such as cosmological principle, equivalence principle and so on. Now let’s go to the isle of Principles and pick up a few bottles of principles. Don’t ask me why there are so many principles in an experimental science such as physics. I bet it has something to do with the fact that Doctors make their living by making definitions. If you ask me, so many principles add a lot of scholastic flavor to physics.

Then walk to the potentials isle. This one is a huge section. So search for a good potential. The latest potentials are very high quality and new and improved and contain 10 per cent more potential. You won’t have any difficulty selecting a heavy duty potential with 1/r^x and then just define x with some nice index. You want a potential which is well-known and not too exotic, unless that’s the game you are playing in this paper. In your case, it won’t hurt to be conservative, choose a safe potential and just add a little flavor of your own. So if the potential is 1/r^1.3 make it 1/r^1.35. This way you are safe. But since this is science you must justify your reason for asserting that nature is a 1/r^1.35 potential and not any other potential previously defined by your scholastic predecessors.

This is easy. Now walk to the most fun and most crowded section of the store, the String Section. You would see that lots of hip scholastic types are shopping here for their string theory needs. Go to M-Theory shelves and look for some action. You see, in order to be cool string theorists redefined potential to be action. Remember, Doctors make their living by making definitions.

In order to choose a good action let’s flip through these piles and piles of actions. So many choices so little time! At the end it is up to you.  Do you want a Nambu-Goto flavored action or do you want a Polyakov type action? Make sure you check the expiration date. Don’t buy any expired action from one of the expired string theory revolutions. After selecting your action then you can gauge it to fit your spacetimes and potential. This is where your creativity comes in. Now you have all the essential ingredients: the principles, potentials, spacetimes, and actions. These are the old scholastic staples which have been used to create scholastic Doctors brew for millennia. All you can do is add your own creative ingredients. Adding rats tail will be creative, but it won’t be good for your career. So don’t add in your paper any statement such as “string theory has yet to make an experimental prediction.” That would be considered adding ugly ingredients to the brew and it is bad taste. If you do such a thing top tier Doctors higher up in the hierarchy will define you as a crank and excommunicate you by adding your email in their spam filter. Remember Doctors make their living by making definitions. You don’t want to give them more material to make more definitions at your expense.

Since the latest buzzword is landscape make room for a boilerplate discussion about landscape. Just go into one of the sleazy string blogs maintained by one of those sleazy string theorists. Ignore all the slut and insults they routinely sling at each other and try to find some comments which mention landscape and cut and paste that into your paper. Make sure you remove the names of sleazy string con artists who would spare no profanity if they found out that you copied their latest brilliant idea. You don’t want to get involved with these sleazy stringbags as yet.

You are almost done. Now let’s take care of your citations. Again, this will take you just a few minutes. Go to arxiv.org and search for similar papers. Be careful, you will get more than 1 billion hits if you just search “string.” You must narrow down your search. You see how easy to shop for a scientific stringy paper and put it all together. Very little assembly required. You can churn out a stringy paper almost every week if you’re a bit diligent. Therefore it is not surprising that there are so many papers on string theory. Remember Doctors make their living by making definitions. A string theory paper is an attempt to make a definition. You are aware as a good Doctor that you are picking and choosing definitions already made by other Doctors and putting them together as a new definition. What does this have to do with nature, with gravity, with universe and things of that nature? Well, God wrote nature in string theory. Therefore your paper is a physics religion and science mashup.

You see writing a physics paper is no more difficult than Christmas shopping. You can do them simultaneously. So once you narrowed down your search in arxiv.org and found some papers just copy their citations and paste them into your paper. For political reasons you must also cite your mentor and advisor and then you are done with your references. As a newbie in this business you may wonder if you need to read all the papers you are citing. NO! It is considered real bad form to read others’ papers even if you cite them. Remember Doctors make their living by making definitions. Your job is to make new definitions. You gain nothing by reading old definitions already made by other Doctors. That would be like, I mean, reading! Such an old fashioned concept! This is the new hip scholasticism for the consumer society. Go surf, shop and cut and paste kind of scholasticism. This modern and cool scholasticism is based on consumerism and will be even more popular since more and more female Doctors are entering the field.

While you are in arxiv.org you might as well shop around for a good title. The title is important. Choose a title which includes the word revolution, some roman numerals and some hip acronyms. Make sure your title makes no sense. This is crucial. Don’t ever, ever, choose a title which makes sense. Composing the title of your paper is an artform. Remember other Doctors will cite your paper without reading its content. Your paper will live and die by its title. The title must imply an absolute solution to the latest buzzword in a most creative and shocking way. This is the avant garde of science. You must shock to get noticed. You’ll learn this eventually. For now just copy a title and make minor modifications on the acronym. So if the title has “AdS/CFT correspondence” make it “AdS/CFT renormalized correspondence.” Use your creativity. But be careful and google the title before you submit the paper. For instance, renormalized correspondence does not preserve E-sigma-lattices, so if you mention Hecke algebras in your paper you cannot use this title because it would make sense. Remember you don’t want to use a title which makes sense.

You are done! Congratulations! Sprinkle your paper with a little bit more philosophical discussions about conjectures and extra dimensions and serve.

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