I've mentioned before how my difficulties with math short-circuited my goal of becoming a researcher in physics, but the truth is, there's more to the story than that.
Even after I realized that I didn't have the mathematical ability -- nor, honestly, enough interest and focus to overcome my challenges -- I still had every intention of pursuing a career in science. I spent some time in the graduate school of oceanography at the University of Washington, and from there switched to biology, but I found neither to be a good fit. It wasn't a lack of interest in the disciplines; biology, in fact, is still a deep and abiding fascination to this day, and I ultimately spent over three decades teaching the subject to high schoolers. What bothered me was the publish-or-perish atmosphere that permeated all of research science. I still recall my shock when one of our professors said, "Scientists spend 25% of their time doing the research they're interested in, and 75% of their time trying to beat everyone else in the field to grant money so they don't starve to death."
It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment that brought me to the realization that the career I'd always dreamed of wasn't for me -- but this was certainly one of the times I said, "Okay, now, just hang on a moment."
I'm not alone in having issues with this. The brilliant theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder did a video on her YouTube channel called "My Dream Died, and Now I'm Here" that's a blistering indictment of the entire edifice of research science. Hossenfelder has the following to say about how science is currently done:
It was a rude awakening to realize that this institute [where she had her first job in physics research] wasn't about knowledge discovery, it was about money-making. And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn't just this particular institute and this particular professor. It was generally the case. The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to money-making. Here's how this works:The topic comes up today because of two separate studies that came out in the last two weeks that illustrate a hard truth that the scientific establishment as a whole has yet to acknowledge; there's a real human cost to putting talented, creative, bright people on the kind of treadmill Hossenfelder describes.
If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, the institution gets part of that money. It's called the "overhead." Technically, that's meant to pay for offices and equipment and administration. But academic institutions pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming. Small scholarships don't make much money, but big research grants can be tens of millions of dollars. And the overhead can be anything between fifteen and fifty percent. This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money. And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves... And the overhead isn't even the real problem. The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name. That's how academia works. Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grant holder. And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants. The result is a paper-production machine in which students and postdocs are burnt through to bring in money for the institution...
I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or to get hired. You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream. You want them to be a little bit edgy, but not too edgy. It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery. And since most grants are three years, or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly...
The more I saw of the foundations of physics, the more I became convinced that the research there wasn't based upon sound scientific principles... [Most researchers today] are only interested in writing more papers... To get grants. To get postdocs. To write more papers. To get more grants. And round and round it goes.
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