Dances with physicists

Assuming that the questions posed by Steve Benka in "The Entangled Dance of Physics" (PHYSICS TODAY, December 2006, page 51) are not meant to be merely rhetorical, I would like to answer some of them. The questions suggest that the answers might reveal a homogeneous group of nonacademic physicists. My answers, however, constitute a sample of one and should be interpreted as such.

I finished my PhD in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. After a couple of postdoctoral assignments, in 1988 I started working in the engineering group of Beckman Instruments Inc in Palo Alto, California. Officially, my title is now something like "senior staff advanced research scientist," but I refer to myself as "senior staff physicist" on all correspondence and on my business card. So, in answer to the question "Do physicists [outside academia] have an inferiority complex or the opposite?" I would say I am very proud to be a physicist and consider that a core part of my identity, both personal and professional. To the question "Have they become apathetic to or ashamed of their origins?" my answer is emphatically no. I cannot conceive of any physicist becoming apathetic about such a grand science and profession. I always get a sense of thrill when my new issue of PHYSICS TODAY arrives in the mail.

"Have [nonacademic physicists] moved on to heights of discovery in new realms that academics can only dream of?" Hardly! Instead, I have been very busy importing into my organization some well-established engineering tools and technologies that have been developed over decades by the engineering community, especially its aerospace engineering segment. It's a blast! Such powerful tools as you can hardly imagine. But whereas an engineer might see the tools only in terms of their utility, as a physicist I see them as marvelous and complex creations that stem from the entanglements described in the article.

Benka comments that "many who live there [in nonacademia] ply their trade invisibly; we don't know how to see them." I agree, but it's not clear to me to what extent—if at all—the physics community suffers on account of that invisibility. I can say that physics graduate students who approach graduation with the idea that anything else but an academic career is tantamount to failure are badly misinformed. The invisibility of nonacademic physicists can and should be reduced by physics departments inviting us to departmental colloquia for a description of our work. Graduate students should get entangled with nonacademic physicists as early as possible.

Benka's article resonated with me. It captures everything I love about physics, the physics community, and what Victor Weisskopf called "the privilege of being a physicist."

Steve Benka writes that he attended a conference organized by a software developer and that he met two physicists there. One of them did physical research in the field of polymer diapers; the other directed the development of instruments for measuring the dielectric properties of road asphalt. Both saw themselves as engineers, Benka adds, and says he thinks that is a curious self-interpretation.

I think those two physicists are right in calling themselves engineers. I think the entanglement of science and technology compels us to reformulate the problem of physics's invisibility.

Benka has to be admired for his forceful analysis of the basic properties and toolkit of a physicist. But he has disregarded one point: the kinds of things investigated by 21st-century physicists. Normal nonacademic physics does not "pursue answers to eternal questions," Benka says. It has become entangled in the modern-day web of technology, industry, and government programs. Consequently, normal physicists apply their toolkit to the investigation of diaper polymers, road asphalt, hearing aids, semiconductors, optical fibers, and so on. These materials and devices cannot be found in nature. They are the products of human industry.

Both polymer diapers and diaper polymers have been synthesized or manufactured. When the North American continent was first explored, the Allegheny Mountains were there, but neither asphalt roads nor road asphalt could be found. Some materials may be naturally semiconducting, but the normal semiconductors of institutional physics are technological products consisting of synthetic materials.

What of the visibility of normal physics, the scientific discipline that researches into the objects and materials of the everyday world? Its visibility is severely restricted because of its entanglement in the structures of technology, industry, and politics. The restrictions stem from the obligation to remain silent in the interests of political expediency and industrial competition. Secrecy and invisibility are highly valued in those spheres.

The question of physics's visibility becomes the question of its independence. Physics resembles journalism on that point. And Steve Benka knows a great deal about journalism. Science and journalism bear a close family resemblance. Both physicists and journalists are curious about the world. They need to understand its workings, and they try to do so without recourse to authorities. They both also subscribe to the ideal of objectivity. But in both cases it is also true that their independence may be restricted by the power of owners, investors, advertisers, and the like, which can result in intentional invisibility.

Rarely have I been so moved to think about and examine my own curious career path as I was after reading "The Entangled Dance of Physics." Until then, I had considered myself to be a failed physicist.

I graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1978. Through the middle of my sophomore year, my education was an uphill struggle. Then that summer it was as if a switch had been thrown and suddenly it all became clear. For the rest of my time in college, I was like a kid with unlimited funds in the candy store of physics. The sheer elegance of the science was breathtaking.

I had intended to go on to get a doctorate. I was not brilliant, but I was competent and did extremely well on the Graduate Record Exams. However, one day fate sent to the campus a US Navy recruiter who insisted on paying for my drinks at the campus pub. One thing led to another and I became a naval officer in submarines for the next six years. After that, a family, children, and the need for a steady job led me to a commercial nuclear power plant not too far from New York City, where I have been ever since.

I have done many things in nuclear power, and for the past few years I've been an instructor, teaching those who manipulate the controls how and why the plants work as they do. A necessary and important job, but not the one I trained for so long ago. I have regretted that diversion from physics for nearly 30 years. Benka's article, though, made me reexamine things in a different light. I am in fact still a physicist, but simply in another application. For just an instant as I read the article, I was once more a kid in the candy store, surrounded by the elegance and breathtaking beauty of physics. Thank you for that moment.

At the beginning of "The Entangled Dance of Physics," Steve Benka mentions the media coverage that breakthroughs in physics receive and then goes on to say that physics "is grossly undervalued." I could not agree more.

After obtaining a degree in physics, I began a balancing act of pursuing a PhD in geology and working part-time at a geophysical consulting company. This combination seemed natural to me, since my thesis had involved signal processing for ground-penetrating radar and validating techniques borrowed from a related discipline, seismic prospecting.

Even though I originally thought these were the best options for someone with my background, I soon began to think otherwise. Every time I was introduced, my name was followed by a proud "He's a physicist, you know." Then the person introducing me would always go on to say that "nevertheless," I had a background in geophysics.

In industry, being a physicist seemed to convey an image of someone with a deep understanding of grand unified theories (to which I make no claim) but with almost no practical experience. At one time, a coworker suggested to me that it would be easier for me to secure a position if I introduced myself as a geophysicist.

Within academia, I have never felt displaced for being "simply" a physicist. I have been invited to, and even received grants from, societies covering areas from granular materials to biophysics and geology.

I must disagree with Benka on one point: I believe research scientists tend to be more open-minded than people working in industry. Unfortunately, I think a few isolationists in academia are the ones who have been the source of the misperception.

The important and interesting questions Steve Benka asks can be addressed to different audiences. We teach a university course for nonscience students, even physics-fearful students, exclusively from material in the daily newspapers, so we explicitly demonstrate that physics is all around us. The course is very successful, making physics interesting and even fun, and often results in discussions that combine several areas of physics, technology, politics, and money.

Recent discussions in the 25-student class have covered polonium-210, including nuclear physics, alpha decay, dose, half-life, isotopes, and some history of the Curie family; archaeology with neutrons and x rays; fission of uranium-235 and plutonium-239 in regard to the North Korean nuclear test blast; and the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, which involved NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, blackbody radiation, quantum history, and microwaves. We discussed women in physics, such as Lise Meitner, Emma Noether, and Gail Hanson; shock therapy, including the Nernst potential and electrical pulses; and waves on strings and standing waves in pianos in Mozart's time. All these topics were gleaned from local newspapers and the New York Times.

A further benefit to teaching from the headlines is that students can see a physicist think out loud about physics, tell stories, brush away a small effect, approximate wildly to get a simple result, and generally behave the way a physicist behaves. Halfway through the semester, the students seek out and interview a person in the physics department and write up the interview as a newspaper article, a particularly easy form of publication. A couple of weeks later, the class goes to Fermilab to interview a physicist, engineer, or student. As a result of the exercises, these first-year students develop a deep sense of ownership in actually talking to a physicist and writing up an interview on his or her life and work. The course is taught in combination with first-year English composition and therefore involves many writing assignments, including a physics journal and an opinion piece. In the writing workshops and on the overnight trip to Fermilab, the students get to know each other well. A pleasant result is that they perform better when their peers are also friends, and they find, almost without exception, that physics is interesting and accessible.

Benka replies: Jeffrey Marque, Charles Hayes, and José Flores have graciously shared their stories, for which I thank them. It is healthy for more physicists working in the private sector to do likewise, especially with students and faculty at their local institutions of higher learning. The latest statistics available from the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/statistics) indicate that US physics and astronomy departments currently have about 9000 full-time-equivalent faculty, 14 000 graduate students, and 2000 postdocs. We can do the math: Five years from now, most of those faculty will still be where they are today, while most of the students and postdocs will need to find rewarding positions elsewhere. With a cadre of industrial-strength physicists guiding the way into the private sector, a new world of job options will open up.

If I read Joost Mertens's letter correctly, he seems to draw a sharp separation between physics at universities and "normal" nonacademic physics, with only the latter being concerned with "the objects and materials of the everyday world" while the former merely exists at the fringe of the real world. I disagree. As I explicitly said, "of those who continue to do research within academic physics, more choose to work in areas allied with today's and tomorrow's technology . . . than to pursue answers to eternal questions." Mertens correctly observes that much research in the private sector is proprietary—silent and secret and invisible in his words, and I would add inaccessible to journalists—and goes on to fear for the loss of physics's independence. But that is precisely the point: In the halls of academic institutions, that beautiful, independent, comprehensive edifice of physics will, we hope and trust, perpetuate itself for many generations to come; once beyond those halls, however, the tools of the physicist are put to other tasks, even magazine publishing, and the sharp image of a physicist doing physics gets blurred. I for one will no longer think of physicists changing their self-identification as "curious," even as I continue to seek them in all their guises.

The class taught by John Hauptman and Jennifer Lowery sounds like more than just a terrific way to reach students. It offers a way for all of us, whether in or out of academia, to talk easily about physics with our friends and neighbors, with taxi drivers and pedestrians. Wouldn't it be nice to collectively raise the visibility of our favorite discipline, and perhaps even demonstrate some of its relevance to the population at large? I think so.