From Tuesday, and for the rest of this week, I am on vacation. This is my first time off in over half a year. While Europe shuts down for the month of August, and people rest or spend time with family and friends on the coast, I am trying to recover from a terribly stressful year in just a few days. I know this sounds crazy, but it’s the best I can do right now. My sister is visiting, which will hep to pry me apart from my physics obsession for a few days. The first signs of the withdrawal are already apparent – I couldn’t stop dreaming about physics analysis again last night. This has got to stop.
In an attempt to distract myself back into the world of the living, we went to the beach yesterday. It was extremely peaceful, if a little too cold. Jodi, my sister, and I lay on the sand, mocking the 12-year-olds with their mini surfboards, watching real surfers brave the chilling water to catch some modest waves, and generally just feeling our pulses slow down. It was delightful. Today, we’re going to do some hiking and then hit a ball game tonight up in the city. Hopefully, my dreams tonight will be completely empty of the siren song of physics.
As part of my vacation, I’m catching up on reading that I have been accumulating for months. I started tearing through Lloyd Alexander’s series of fantasy books featuring Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper. The basis of the Disney movie “The Black Cauldron”, these books are an excellent and short series of reads with stories grounded in Welsh mythology. It’s been a very pleasant revisiting of stories I first loved in my earlier days.
I’ve also been catching up on news publications. One issue of Newsweek, normally a forgettable rag, caught my attention a few weeks ago. “Global Warming ig a Hoax*” is proclaims in large white letters across an image of the Sun. Below the sun is the subtitle, referred to by the “*” in the main title. “* Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change”. The main story in this issue deals with the history of global climate change science, and the well-paid skeptics who tried to undermine the growing consensus in the scientific community. It’s actually quite an amazing story, some of which I knew but much which was unclear.
I encourage you to actually go and read this article (I’m sure it’s available at your library). One of the things that really jumped out at me was something also bothered Senator Barbara Boxer. After the most recent report of the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, concluded that the warming we see now is caused by humans with 90% or greater confidence, a “conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil . . . had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report.” This made me mad. It also gave me a chance to think about what it means to be a real scientist, and a chance to think once more about the toolkit that we should all apply in order to be skeptical about claims and counterclaims in and against science.
“Follow the money.” This was the legendary advice from informant “Deep Throat” to Woodward and Bernstein, the reporters whose work eventually led to the collapse of the corrupt Nixon administration. It’s also very good advice for making a judgement of the validity of science. Science is a public good, and as such has largely been funded by the federal government. The basic research that is performed by this community often has not obvious benefit, but its longest term impacts can cure disease, inspire generations of new scientists, transform our social contract, and rewrite our very understanding of the universe. As such, publicly traded companies beholden to the short-term whims of its stockholders consider science a risk without benefit, a profitless pitfall that undercuts the bottom line because its view is five, 10, even 50 years out — not into the next quarter.
In my experience, a real scientist is a person who is proud to admit, “I don’t do this for the money.” There’s no way we COULD be doing this for the money. A typical post-doc, for instance, can make anywhere from $30,000 – $60,000 per year. In a place like California, this barely entitles us to rent. We can’t afford to own any property. My friends who left the field own condos, or even homes. The only physicists I know who actually own anything tend to have two median incomes, or “married up” (that goes for women and men, by the way). But the real scientist looks at it this way: “I do this work, and I happen to get paid for it.” They never seem to think, “I’ll do this work for money.”
I’ll leave you with this. Anyone who feels that in order to publish their work, they have to be paid $10,000 for it, is a phony. The work should stand for itself, both in the mind of the scientist and under the withering scrutiny of peers. If an idea is truly sound, based on data and arriving at conclusions that can be further tested, it should be able to withstand review and make it into a journal. The more you have to pre-pay for an idea, the less its actual scientific worth. Take that to the bank.
