Physicist Peter Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today 308
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Higgs, the physicist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, says he doubts any university would give him a job today. Higgs says universities wouldn't consider him productive enough — though the papers he published were important and of high quality, he didn't have the volume necessary for serious consideration in today's competitive employment environment. 'He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.' His comments highlight the absurdity of the current system for finding researchers in academia. How many researchers of Higgs' caliber have been turned down for similar reasons?"
kind of ruins the point....... (Score:4, Insightful)
Money, Money, Money..... (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the BBC did a programme a few years ago asking why people are so sceptical about science these days. This is exactly why.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
You completely misunderstand what this is about. The problem is that productivity is measured in number of publications, regardless of quality of said publications. Anything that can scape by the reviewers, often in a 3rd or 4th attempt counts. The guy that gets all his stuff published on the first attempt, because it is actually good, does not stand a chance, because he will never get the numbers.
The problem is that low quality publications actually represent negative productivity.
The double standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Go to most science and engineering departments in the U.S. today, and you'll find senior faculty members sitting on P&T (promotion and tenure) committees who would never qualify for tenure if they were judged by the same standards they apply to junior faculty. You'll meet assistant professors who've published more journal papers in two years (and brought in more research money) than a full professor has done in his entire career, while being told it isn't good enough by the P&T committee.
That double standard is not lost on the younger faculty, nor does not make them happy. To add insult to injury, the younger faculty generally tend to be better teachers, as well. It is a topsy-turvy world where the people in charge are often the least qualified of anyone there.
This (Score:5, Insightful)
Making sure someone is constantly busy in any intellectual field is a sure-fire way to kill any hope of creativity. The best ideas often come from moments when you can just clear your head completely or just play around with ideas on your own without worrying about your productivity. Modern society seems to have forgotten this.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of my Health class in high school. At the end of the semester (it was a 1-semester class only, usually the other semester was used for driver's ed), the crazy old teacher gave everyone a grade on their notebook. His method for determining the quality of your notebook? The number of pages in it. I got a bad grade, because I wrote small and had few pages, even though I wrote down everything important. The guy next to me had giant writing, and filled up a bunch of pages just writing "Health is cool!" and got a high grade.
You think Universities would be more intelligent in their rating of professors than some idiotic old gym coach, but apparently not.
Re:I can confirm that (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's suppose you're the fund manager and you want to maximize impact of your dollars. But there are too many researchers applying for grant. What do you do? You divest rather than invest, and hope that one of the projects will churn out useful outcome.
If you want to focus your money for deeper impact, people will definitely accuse you of favoritism. It is hard to prove innocent because research is, intrinsically, a very specialized craft, and only very specialized people understand the qualifications. Sometimes experts don't agree on the qualifications either. Once you are accused and unable to prove yourself innocent, your career as a fund manager would be ruined due to academic misconduct allegations. If you distribute your funds fairly and squarely, people can still accuse you of favoritism, but at least you have plausible deniability.
From a researcher's point of view, research is really about begging money to do things you want to do. Or if you end up not doing what you want to do, simply begging money. Historically only the nobles have the time and money to do research. This is what I always tell my friends:
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a result of attempts to use "quantifiable metrics". The original idea is great: By having a numerical measurement of a workers productivity (whether that worker is a floor-sweeper or a physicist), we reduce the effects of bias, favoritism, etc in evaluating employees. The problem though is that it is impossible to produce a good metric for many types of work. When a poor metric is used, we strongly motivate workers to maximize that metric, not their "real" productivity. There is a nearly identical problem in school grades: we want to eliminate bias in grading so we use "standardized tests". Pretty soon teachers are teaching the test, not the subject.
In my opinion, where I work the most productive scientists are not the ones who publish the largest number of papers.
Re:Can We Compete Against Them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good luck with your accreditations. I'd be willing to bet that there are a few 'pedigree' requirements with regard to your faculty. That said, if you make enough news with your 'alternative' you might be able to get people to not care.
Unfortunately for someone like me, any contract I work for the government usually has strict degree/education standards.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the quality of a scientist is measured by the number of publications and the reputation of the journal or conference they published their work. However, both values do not measure quality. The first is just quantity and can be achieved by spreading results over different publications, which lowers the overall quality of every single publication. The second tries to correct this, by factoring in that good publication channels do quality checks with peer review. However, that fails when you look into peer review process. While in general it is a good idea, there are several problems with this. First, the review may miss the point of the publication especially when it is a new thought. Second, reviewer are more convinced of work which they know the author or the professor also listed in the author section. And third, even with good reviews, the program committee favors known and liked scientists over unknown scientists. So there is a lot of bias at work. Finally, the reputation of a publication channel is determined by its impact in the past. Even if it is crap right now, it is rated higher than a good publication just because of the history.
Beside these problems, the present system limits science and its potential outcome as scientists optimize for it. An alternative would allow for more think time. However, this is not possible with the present system. He does not propose a new one, but we should start thinking about a new one or lose our ability to innovate and increase our understanding of the universe.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Insightful)
The publishing frequency is not really the determining factor.
I very much think you will find it is these days. The research that is being done today is mostly junk, cheap industrial research and that's based on keeping the grants and the patent applications flowing. If you aren't part of the team who buys into that and wants to do something that takes time and effort you're not going to fit in.
Re:The double standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite correct, but you're missing the obvious. In the case of your senior manager, their decision to hire a more qualified person means that there should be an improvement from one generation to the next. As long as that trend continues, we can reasonably expect things to keep improving as time goes on. In the case of a full professor hiring someone who can churn out more papers of a lower quality, we're actually pretty much assured that we'll see a step backwards from one generation to the next. As long as that trend continues, we can reasonably expect that the quality of research will decline as time goes on.
Old judging the young is not the problem, nor is the problem that a different standard is being applied. The problem is that a worse standard is being applied.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is Higgs actual point. Because of the demanded quantity, it is not actually possible to do quality work anymore. He believes that under today's conditions, he would not have had his key insight at all. In fact, he doesn't believe that anyone else is likely to have such an insight under today's conditions.
Further, he states flat out that if he wasn't widely favored to win a Nobel Prize, he would have been fired. by the '80s. In other words, his employer was more interested in his celebrity than with his actual work.
Don't forget failure (Score:4, Insightful)
In today's world, the importance of failure is not understood.
Re:Money, Money, Money..... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Here is your lab, here is your staff. We will pay for your lab and your staff for the next five years, plus materials and equipment and a small petty cash budget for operations (computers, pizza parties.) You have five years to produce a quality research paper that is accepted for publication on the first shot. No paper, no promotion. No science happens, you're back to teaching undergrads for the rest of your career. Go!"
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Insightful)
4 scientific papers in 5 years is a tremendous rate for more physical sciences. It's possible, in my observation, to have have a few basically "filler" papers in progress while the genuinely interesting or illuminating paper is published. But effectively publishing one significant paper a year, accepted to reputable journals, is a tremendous amount of work in most fields such as chemistry, physics, or engineering. Social science papers can publish analyses of analyses of analyses as "new" publichations, and have been doing so for decades. But in sciences where you have to actually collect raw data, it's very frequent publication.
Re:Impact factor metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, if e.g. all you have ever published are four papers, your H index cannot go above four, even if those four papers are the best papers ever and each of them gets more citations than all the other papers in the world combined.
Also, the H index by its very nature gives advantage to people doing lots of collaborations, because that increases the chance that your collaborators (or people associated with them) will cite your articles (in part because some of them are also their articles, and in part because they are simply more likely to recognize your papers because they know you). Of course doing lots of collaborations doesn't imply you're a better scientist. It just means you're better at networking.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
If theoretical physicists are re-purposed as fundraisers by age 51, then that just enlarges on his point.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, how about this for a system: instead of counting how many papers a researcher publishes, count the number of times a paper he has written has been cited by somebody else.
This is truer measure in any case. I recently had occasion to review the information science research literature on ontologies, and discovered that about 5% of the literature was absolutely vital to read, and were cited by a substantial fraction of papers in the field -- hundreds of times in my own literature search, and likely thousands of times in total in peer reviewed literature.
About 20% dealt with abstruse and narrow technical topics which were nonetheless useful to people working in the field; or were case studies. Such papers make up the bulk of citations in the research literature, although any single such paper probably gets only a few dozen citations. Still that's useful work.
The remaining 3/4 of papers are trivial, a complete waste of anyone's time to read. They may score a handful of citations, but from authors scraping the bottom of the barrel. They're so trivial, obvious, and unoriginal.
Odd side note: the less an author has to say, the more elaborately he says it. The really important papers tend to be written in straightforward, easily understandable prose. The trivial papers read like parodies of academ-ese.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Insightful)
if you're not averaging one good paper a year then there's probably something wrong with you as a researcher
That is *exactly* what Peter Higgs is complaining about. His point is that great ideas don't come about once a year - and that if he was 40 years younger he wouldn't get positions because he wouldn't be fulfilling the quota - and thus great ideas are being lost in this treadmill.