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.
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