You don’t have to mention it, and I rarely do. In academia the adherence to titles is pretty ingrained (professor, doctor, etc), while in government and business I find it is not. No one around here would introduce themselves that way without a ton of rolled eyes, and the assumption would be that he was overcompensating for being incompetent. Apparently who has a PhD is a water cooler topic.
That is how I should have phrased it. This is exactly what I meant.
People seem to place much more value on my opinion because of the PhD. Either that or I have shown myself to be incredibly astute and intelligent, but I think the three letters are a more likely explanation.
I have particularly noticed it when working on a temporary assignment where I am doing project management with relatively few other PhDs. When I am back at NASA, where PhDs grown on trees, it makes almost no difference.
In my experience pretty much the only people who use Dr. in industry are the only PhD is a smallish company where their training is not assumed. No one used it at Bell Labs. One new guy did, and my boss told him that he probably didn’t want anyone to ask him to write a prescription.
I work with several Phd’s, mostly in economics. Outside of academia, I’ve only met one that insisted on everyone referring to him as Dr.Whatever. He wasn’t as smart as a he thought he was. Sadly, for him, he soon had to return to academia, where his ego could be soothed.
My work email signature has “Ph.D”. I could be humble and leave it out, but I choose not to because 1) I earned the title, 2) I feel like it might be useful to have when I’m requesting information from scientists who don’t personally know me (but who might otherwise assume I want watered-down information rather than the technical stuff), and 3) because citizens frequently contact me for assurances that they aren’t about to go swimming in cholera-infested waters and I want them to know that they’ve got a highly trained scientist giving them those assurances.
But I only use my Ph.D signature for external communication. Sometimes new coworkers call me “Dr.”, but that’s just because they don’t feel comfortable calling me monstro like everyone else does.
I have encountered several math Ph.Ds in energy trading. They were referred to as quants for their expertise in quantitative analysis. They worked long hours, but made tons of money and were given a lot of resources and freedom. I don’t think Masters level quants were given the same respect/cash/freedom.
Estes motors are pressed black powder grains, not cast ccomposite propellants. The PBAN, CTPB, and HTPB binders used in large solid propellant rocket motors (along with the AP and Al “solids loading”) are designed specifically to require high temperatures and pressures (provided by an igniter, which is essentially a miniature rocket motor mounted in the forward or end boss of motor) in order to be ignited. Even after the grain is ignited, once the case is split the loss of contained pressure reduces the combustion to a very low level once it falls below the pressure deflagration limit due to the combustion products carrying away so much heat energy; even at ground level the propellant will only smoulder slowly until it loses enough heat that it can’t sustain any reaction, and at altitudes of over 20kft the grain fragments will snuff entirely. This is not only necessary for safety (to be able to extinguish an out-of-control motor) but also to be able to control the burn rate to reasonable limits while maintaining a useful operating pressure range that is high enough to provide good ballistic performance but within the capability of the motor case to hold pressure, and to not create a runaway pressure-burn rate feedback loop.
This is basic solid propellant interior ballistics, accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of combustion processes, and well documented in many textbooks and references including Sutton’s ubiquitous Rocket Propulsion Elements, a standard text that Dr. Dual Ph.Ds in “Space Rocket Science” (no recognized university offers such a degree program) was unfamiliar with and refused to acknowledge. After ten minutes of trying to walk him around to understanding the errors in his reasoning and why a chunck of propellant ejected from a flight terminated motor wouldn’t continue to burn “for days”, I just let him spew his crazy, at length and great volume until even his own management was so embarassed that they pulled him off our program.
My PhD advisor was very forthright in telling us all that the only reason to pursue a doctorate in history was to become a professor. In a sense, this was inaccurate - one of his newly-minted PhDs got an immediate placement as a counselor, for which the degree was required - but that was still in academia.
hijack/ Stranger, as ever I learn something every time I interact with you. I had always assumed that once a solid fuel rocket lit off,such as the Shuttle boosters, that they would continue to burn regardless of the state of the casing, much like my beloved Estes motors. /hijack
To address the OP, wouldn’t the idea of pursuing a doctorate for it’s own sake be enough? A PhD in philosophy may not have a direct use but the tangential benefits of thinking deeply about a subject may well be its own intrinsic reward…
With the propellant flake grain of an Estes type motor, the grain is wetted and pressed, and when dry is held together essentially by friction. (Some of the homemade propellants include some kind of start to starch as a crude binder, and the commercial manufacturers of cartridge motors probably do something similar.) This is fine for a small motor that operates at low pressure, but at higher pressure and dynamic conditions the propellant grain (the solid block of propellant) will fracture and introduce more burning surface that would create a rapid overpressure, which is one of the reasons pressed flake propellants aren’t used in modern tactical or strategic rocket motors. (Another is that the forces required to press such large grains have a nasty tendency to ignite the propellant even if it is wet.)
The cast composite grain is basically a very dense polymer, similar to the compounds used in tire tread, which acts as a binder holding a distribution of the ‘solids’ loading (ammonium perchlorate, aluminum, and various burn rate modifiers). In order to burn the surface has to be at a high enough temperature to dissociate the polymer binder, and once it does, there has to be enough ambient pressure to retain the solids in proximity to the released surface so that the heat of combustion is close enough to maintain the temperate to sustain dissociation of the binder. The result is that without the case to maintain adequate pressure, the burn rate drops dramatically; at altitude combustion is completely extinguished, and even at ground level the combustion is snuffed to the point of just smoldering. It certainly won’t “burn for days” or “set off a wildfire” despite the allegations of Dr. Double Phad, the point to which I made explicit and was loudly castigated for.
Ironically, the audience contained three expert ballisticians (all with doctorates who didn’t bother to announce their credentials because everyone else knew who they were and that they had decades of experience with the phenomenology of solid propellant combustion) all of whom affirmed that the above mechanism is how composite propellant grains burned, notwithstanding the objections of Doctor Double, who continued to insist that loose propellant could set fire to the entire Eastern Seaboard.
Yes - that’s something that’s not been mentioned much in this thread. Doctorates do, if nothing else, allow people to study something which (hopefully) they are interested in in a huge amount of depth. There is a lot of intrinsic value in that.
The science PhD environment that I’m familiar with is quite an entrepreneurial one IMHO - it shows you the power of ideas to change things. This is readily apparent if you’re in a young, fast-moving field where your papers can shape the direction and growth of the area. If you’re working in a more venerable area it’s more difficult, as you need to be really good and really lucky to rock the foundations of something that’s been in continual development for 200 years, but it can be done. THis sort of naked creativity process is exceptional experience for whatever you go on to do with your life.
Now being real about it, ask any academic how many of their research group display this sort of intellectual fearlessness, to do what should be done, not what could be done, and the numbers are likely to be disappointing. But the opportunity is always there, and most students do attempt to achieve their own version of it IME.
