Quantum Diaries

Here I sit with my feet up thinking deep thoughts and some fool tells me I have to publish if I want to get paid. Curse you, Robert Boyle (1627–1692)! Don’t they know that publishing takes time away from thinking deep thoughts? After all, thinking deep thoughts is the sole reason for theoretical physicists to exist. Aw well, I suppose, I must. But things were different before Robert Boyle. Alchemists were very careful about who would learn their secrets. A lot of the information was passed down orally to apprentices or written in code. After all, if you had learned the magic incantation for turning lead into gold, you did not want your competitors butting in and driving up the price of lead. But that all changed with Robert Boyle. He started the trend of publishing his results so others could build on what he had done. Also perhaps because he could not, himself, understand what his assistant, Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703), had done and thought that others perhaps could if he made the results available. Thus he published and started a trend.

Since the time of Robert Boyle, publishing has become the standard by which scientists are judged. One needs at least one publication for a Ph. D, 15 to 20 for a permanent job (in my specialty), and one very good one to get a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, publishing does not directly correlate with how much you get paid. Now, my father cut down trees for a living and was paid for each ton of trees trucked to the pulp mill. Perhaps it could be similar with scientists: pay them by the ton of paper consumed rather than produced. At the end of the year, weigh up the paper used to publish their work and pay accordingly. A good journal would then be one that had a large circulation and used a lot of dead trees.  Of course, then you might get a bunch of really prolific writers, but a lack of deep thinkers.  And never mind electronic publication—that throws a whole new element in. Guess we’ll have to throw the paid-by-the-ton scheme out the window.

The world of electronic publishing leads to an interesting digression: What is a publication? Everyone agrees that words printed on dead trees and circulated form a publication. But what about words that never appear on dead trees? With even Newsweek becoming an electronic only publication, I guess that electronic publications must be considered legitimate. Going further, what about preprint servers like arXiv? It seems to me that arXiv largely replaces the need for the traditional journals. I always took the point of view that I would put my papers on arXiv so other scientists would read them and then submit it to a regular journal so I could put it on my CEV as a peer-reviewed publication. I also used that electronic archive as my main source of information on what was going on in my field. The archival, printed journals I rarely looked at. If we had a rating and peer-review system for papers on the electronic archives we could safely do away with the traditional journals. However, my boss does like to brag about the number of laboratory papers that make the cover of Nature.

But back to the main point, publishing is important. The first reason is that while publishing  a lot of papers does not necessarily indicate that one is making a major contribution, no papers probably does indicate that one is sleeping rather than thinking deep thoughts. Thus, papers published should be considered the first indication of scientific productivity—and a baseline for your supervisor to keep paying your or not. The second reason (and the one that Boyle initiated when he didn’t understand his assistant’s work) is that peer review, in the broad sense, plays a major role in error control. It is one’s peers that will ultimately decide if one’s thoughts are deep or shallow, on track or not. The only way one’s peers can critique one’s work is if it is published and made available. The third reason is that science progresses by building on what has gone before, and to this, we must thank Boyle. It is the published journals and the much-maligned archival journals that keep the record of what has been learned. While much that is published can safely be forgotten, the gems, like Einstein’s papers, are also there.

So if you wish to flourish as a scientist and not perish, it is best to publish—but only good papers, as to not bog down the archives or kill too many trees. As for me, I wonder if I can count these blogs as publications on my CEV. That would give me an additional sixty publications. Probably not. Anyway when I retire in a few years, I will have a CEV burning party so it really does not matter.

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In any genealogy there are always things one wants to hide; the misfit relative, the children born on the wrong side of the sheet, or the relative Aunt Martha just does not like. As a genealogist it takes a lot of effort to find these things out. Genealogies tend to be sanitized: the illegitimate grandchild becomes a legitimate child, the misfit relative somehow missed being included, and Uncle Ben aged 15 years during the 10 years between censuses and died at age one hundred although he was only eighty[1] according to the earliest records. The roots of science, like all family histories, have undergone a similar sanitization process. In a previous essay, I gave the sanitized version. In this essay, I give the unauthorized version. Aunt Martha would not be happy.

The Authorized Version has the origins of science tied closely to the Greek philosophical tradition with science arising within and from that tradition. While that has some truth to it, it is not the whole truth. It was two millennia from Aristotle to the rise of science and there have been many rationalizations for this delay, many starring Christianity as the culprit. However, Christianity did not gain political strength for a few centuries after Aristotle’s death. So, if the cause was Christianity, it must have had a miraculous non-causal effect.

A lot happened between Aristotle and the rise of science: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Christianity and Islam, the Renaissance, the reformation, and the printing press.  A lot of what could be called knowledge was developed but did not provide major gains in philosophy. The Romans were for the most part engineers not philosophers, but to do engineering takes real knowledge. Let us pass on to the Arabs. They are generally considered as a mere repository for Greek knowledge which was then passed on to the West largely intact but with some added commentary. I suspect that is not correct, as I will argue shortly.

There are two contributions to the development of science that are frequently downplayed: astrology and alchemy. These are the ancestors that science wants to hide. We all know the story of the Ptolemy and Copernicus, but the motivation for the development of astronomy was astrological and religious. From the ancient Babylonians to the present day, people have tried to divine the future by studying the stars. It is no accident that astronomy was one of the first sciences. It had practical applications: astrology (Kepler was a noted astrologer) and the calculation of religious holidays, most notably Easter.  One of the reasons Copernicus’s book was not banned was because the church found it useful for calculating the date of Easter. The motion of the planets is also sufficiently complicated that they could not be predicted trivially, yet they were sufficiently simple to be amenable to treatment by the mathematics of the day. Hence, it became the gold standard of science.  Essentially we dropped the motivation but kept the calculations.

Alchemy, the other problem ancestor, is even more interesting.  The Arabs, those people who are considered to have produced nothing new, had within their ranks Jābir ibn Hayyān (721 – 815),  chemist and alchemist, astronomer and astrologer, engineer, geographer, philosopher, and physicist, pharmacist and physician—in general, an all-around genius. He, along with Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), is regarded as the founder of modern chemistry, but note how far in advance Jābir ibn Hayyān was—900 years.  Certainly he took alchemy beyond the occult to the practical. Although the alchemists never succeeded in turning lead into gold, they did produce a lot of useful metallurgy and chemistry. It is indeed possible that along with his chemical pursuits, Jābir ibn Hayyān forged the foundation of science by going down to the laboratory and seeing how things actually worked.  It is no surprise that the first two people to introduce something like science into Western Europe, Frederick II (1194 – 1250) and Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1294), were both very familiar with Arab scholarship and presumably with Jābir ibn Hayyān’s work.  In addition, both Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) and Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691) were alchemists. A major role for alchemy in the development of science cannot be creditably denied.

It is perhaps wrong to think of astrology and alchemy as separate. To turn cabbage into sauerkraut, you need to know the phase of the moon[2] and the same probably holds true for turning lead into gold. Hence, most alchemists were also astrologers.  But alchemy and astrology have always had a dark side of occult, showmanship, and outright fraud. A typical, perhaps apocryphal, example would be Dr. Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480 – c. 1540). He was killed around 1540 when his laboratory exploded. Or his laboratory exploded when the devil came to collect his soul.  This person is presumably the origin of the Dr. Faust legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge.  It interesting that this legend arose in the late sixteenth century just as science was beginning to rise from obscurity. The general population’s suspicion of learning, there from the beginning, has perhaps never really gone away.

The philosophers and theologians, the beautiful people, had their jobs in the monasteries and universities but science owes more to the people who sold their soul, or at least their health, to the devil for knowledge. These were the people who actually went down to the laboratories and did the dirty work to see how the world actually works.

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Many years ago, I served on a committee responsible for recommending funding levels for research grants. After the awards were announced, a colleague commented that all we did was count the number of publications and award grants in proportion to that number. So, I checked and did a scatter plot. Boy, did they scatter. The correlation between the grant size and the number of publications was not that strong. I then tried citations; again a large scatter. Well, perhaps the results really were random—nah, that could not happen; I was on the committee after all.

I did not do a multivariable analysis, but there were no simple correlations between what might be called quantitative indicators and the size the research grant. This supports the conclusions of the Expert Panel on Science Performance and Research Funding: Mapping research funding allocation directly to quantitative indicators is far too simplistic, and is not a realistic strategy[1]. Trying to do that is making the mistake of the logical positivists who wanted to attach significance directly to the measurements. As I have argued in previous essays, the meaning is always in the model and logical positivism leads to a dead end.

In deciding funding levels, the situation is too complicated for the use of a simple algorithm.  Consider the number of publications. There are different types of publications: letters, regular journal articles, review articles, conference contributions, etc. Publications are of different lengths. Should one count pages rather than publications? Or is one letter worth two regular journal papers; letters being shorter and considered by some to be more important than regular articles.  But, in reality, one wants to see a mix of the different types of publications. A review article might indicate standing in the field but one also wants to see original papers.  Is a paper in a prestigious journal worth more than one in a more mundane journal? What is a prestigious journal anyway? There is also the question of multi-author papers. One gets suspicious if all the papers are with more senior or well-known authors but all single author papers is also a warning sign. Generally co-authoring papers with junior collaborators is a good thing. In some fields, all papers include all members of the collaboration so the number of coauthors carries very little information. The order of authors on a publication may or may not be important. And on it goes. Expert judgment is, as always, required to sort out what it all means.

Citations are an even bigger can of worms. Even in a field as small as sub-atomic theoretical physics there are distinct variations in the pattern of citations among the subfields: string theory, particle phenomenology or nuclear physics. For example, the lifetime for citations in particle phenomenology is significantly less than in nuclear physics. Then there is the question of self-citations, citations to one’s own work or, more subtle, to close collaborators. And what about review articles?  Is a citation to a review article as important as one to an article on original research?   Review articles frequently collect more references. My most cited paper is a review article. A person can, with a bit of effort, sort this all out. Setting up an algorithm would be damn near impossible. A person could even, gasp, read some of the papers and form an independent opinion of their validity. But that could introduce biases. Hence, numbers are important but they must be interpreted. This leads to the conclusion: Quantitative indicators should be used to inform rather than replace expert judgment in the context of science assessment for research funding allocation.[2]

The other problem with simple algorithms is the feedback loop. With a simple algorithm, researchers naturally change their behaviour to maximize their grants. For example, if we judge on the number of publications, people split papers up, publish weak papers, or publish what is basically the same thing several times. I have done that myself. None of these improve the quality of the work being done. Expert judgment can generally spot these a mile away. After all, the experts have used these tricks themselves.

More generally, there is the problem of trying to reduce everything to questions that have nice quantitative answers. Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong questions, which can always be made precise[3]. There seems to be this argument that since science normally uses quantitative methods, administration should follow suit so it can have the success of science. It is like the medieval argument that since most successful farmers had three cows; the way to make farmers successful was to give them all three cows.  But the wrong question can never give the right answer. It is far better to ask the right question and then work on getting a meaningful answer. What we want to do at a science laboratory, or for funding science generally, is to advance our understanding of how the universe works to maximum extent possible and use the findings for the benefit of society. The real question is how do we do this? That is neither an easy question to answer nor one that can be easily quantified. Not being quantifiable does not make it a meaningless question. There are various metrics an informed observer can use to make intelligent judgments. But it is very important that administrators avoid the siren call of logical positivism and not try to attach meaning directly to a few simple measurements.

This essay is in part motivated by an excellent Quantum Diary post, Art and Science: Both or Neither, written by a fellow TRIUMFonian, Jordan Pitcher.  He explores the incommensurability of art and science. In response, this essay is about related matters of art and taste such as if the original Bugs Bunny cartoons represent the pinnacle of the cartoon trade (beyond debate) or if my essays are worth reading (debatable).

Now, science is about learning how the universe operates, but there is more to life than that; he says while listening to: Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and roll, And drift away[1]. I do not know if that is art but it is certainly not science. This brings us to the aesthetic side of life, including music, art, literature, theatre, movies, and cartoons (see above). With art, my house is full of the pictures my mother-in-law painted and it ain’t half bad stuff. I particularly like the autumn scenes. Similarly, I have my tastes in literature (I particularly like a good Rex Stout (1886 – 1975) detective story—and don’t say that is not literature); theatre (Wicked was not bad); movies (I took my daughter to The Smurfs[2] but can skip movies with no loss); and the appropriate use of grammar (ain’t, ain’t half bad[3]). That brings me to fonts: Is comic sans really that bad? And I have seen major disagreements on the relative merits of sans serif versus serif—a plague on both your houses. And do not forget food; a fried mackerel would go real good about now.

I lived through the culture wars of the 1960s and it turned me off culture wars—meaningless arguments over personal preferences.  There were great debates about whether rock and roll was legitimate music or the work of the devil. There was even a debate about whether the lyrics of one particular song (Louie Louie) were obscene, but no one could tell what the lyrics actually were so the argument was moot. Similarly, is abstract art really art or can art only be more realistic works like Rubens (1557 – 1640)? Hmm, perhaps that is not the best example but there can be no doubt that the arts enrich life. Again, perhaps Rubens might not be the best example.

A central characteristic of science is that it has mechanisms, comparison to observation, and parsimony to uniquely determine which model or approach is best. But there are no similar criteria to decide if Beethoven (1770 – 1827) is really better than the Beastie Boys (1981 – 2012). I do not particularly like either (Oh, give me the beat). Considering Beethoven’s staying power and the Beastie Boys record sales, I guess I am in a minority. So it is across the whole scope of the arts; some people like one thing and some another. One should not mistake personal preference for objective reality, but give me that beat.

It is also not a scientist versus humanitarian kind of thing. The likes and dislikes cut across that divide. Perhaps the likes of scientists may be tilted in a somewhat different direction but the spread in each group is large. There is, instead, a large upbringing and cultural influence on what ones likes and dislikes. My Asian born daughter loves sushi but my Nova Scotian raised relatives would not touch it with a three metre (roughly ten foot) pole. The choice of preferred music, art, food, etc depends at least in part on what one was exposed to while growing up. There is probably even a genetic component to what one likes and dislikes. I inherited my like for and ability in mathematics from my mother; similarly my inability to write coherently. The latter plagued my time in school and university. What one sees has a genetic component; as in colour blindness. There are also studies suggesting some women have four rather than three types of colour sensors. It would be strange if inherited differences such as these did not affect our aesthetic tastes. Indubitably, some of the differences in our tastes are indeed in our brains—either acquired or inherited.

The one downside of all the differences in taste is that some denizens of the art world think that since the arts have no or only weak objective standards, science cannot have any either. This leads to nonsense like the claim that science is purely cultural. Conversely, there is the equally ridiculous perception that the arts should have objective standards like science. Salt herring is an acquired taste (shudder).

So let us recognize that science and the arts are indeed very different in how they make judgments and celebrate the diversity permitted by the subjectivity in the arts. After all, life would be very boring if all we had to read was Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) or Farley Mowat, (b. 1921).

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