I should point out that quasicrystals still aren’t really taught. I suppose it could just be my education (and being too young for the initial controversy) but when I heard the announcement on NPR while driving to work I had no idea what the work was.
For example, in high school bonding angles is all VSEPR theory. In college you get valence bonding and molecular orbitals in organic and things like ligand field theory and symmetry point groups in inorganic and P. Chem. In all my classes, quasicrystals were never mentioned, including my one graduate inorganic course.
Then again, I am an organic chemist and never covered polymorphs in class either. Everything I know about polymorphs I learned in industry.
Do you have any conception of how competitive it is these days to get any sort of funding for basic research? Money, their livelihood, their career, their sense of self-worth: those are what people have to lose.
I would have thought that really bright kids considering a career in physics would do their research, read up on a few case histories … and then run like hell in the opposite direction.
Physics recruits clever kids who can solve technical problems, because that’s what’s needed for the defence industry. Bright kids, who are liable to ask what their work is going to be used for, are not so welcome. So the classic physics intake is probably represented by Sakharov and Oppenheimer, both of whom were mind-achingly clever, but perhaps, when you look at how adeptly both of them were manipulated by their respective military handlers, not all that bright.
Another issue is overstock. Because physics is considered to be a defence-critical occupation (last time I saw a statistic, over half of the UK’s physics graduates were employed in the defence industry), we try to train more than we actually need, with the result that a whole load of starry-eyed youngeters who are lured into the field in the hope of winning fame and fortune and a Prize end up either working on weapons design, or teaching, or they bale out and do something totally different (and end up as website designers, or computer programmers, or coffeeshop owners).
So … if you’re a bright kid, and you’re thinking of joining an industry-stroke-profession that once rejected Einstein (***ing Einstein!) as being unfit for employment, you realise that your careers people are spinning you a line, you realise that other bright kids are going to be making a similar assessment to yours and and baling out … and that means that you’ll be left with a load of potential colleagues who either aren’t bright enough to realise how bad things are likely to be, or aren’t diligent enough at background research to have checked, or who started out with a talent for maths, and switched to physics at the last moment because they realised that they weren’t quite good enough at math to be able to compete with the top math guys, and figured that physics was an easier way to make their mark.
So you might think, cool, that means I’ll have less credible competition and it’ll be easier to do really well in pysics … except then you realise that if the same recruiting problems have been going on for decades, then all the people above you, who your career is going to depend on and who will be doing your peer review, might not represent the brightest sector of the community either … and once they’ve realised that they arent likely to make any stunning discoveries themselves, they may take it as a personal affront if you declare that you can succeed where they failed. That’s just rude. If their main professional value is their familiarity with a certain standard theory, and you’re talking about overturning that theory, then they may have a good reason not to be overjoyed at the idea, and to want to sincerely believe that you have no chance of success.
Their lives are easier and simpler if they decide that you’re wrong, and assume that all their other colleagues will do the same. As long as nobody breaks ranks, you’re blocked, their assumption that you can’t succeed becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy and they win.
Once a bright kid has has thought though all of this, it becomes apparent that if they really want to change the world, the smart thing to do is to start a band or a software company (1980s), or an internet startup (1990s) or a social media company (2000s), become a multimilllionaire in a matter of years (or a billionaire if you’re really on the ball), change people’s lives that way, buy your own island, and … if you still have a hankering for physics, buy or fund your own private research institute and fund the clever physics guys to research what you tell them you want researched.
At least that way you have some control over your life, and you’re not at the mercy of people who would much rather that you didn’t exist. Plus, you’re mega-rich. If you want to d more to help humaity, you can do a Bill Gates and set up your own aid programme
Rather than asking “Why do they leave physics?” I think it might be more appropriate to ask why people go into the field to begin with, and why when they’re in, the ones who stay, stay.
For starters, if you’re male and heterosexual, you’ll have almost no female colleagues to lust after, and outside the lab, being a physicist doesn’t really impress women, or … almost anyone else … unless you have an existing social circle that puts a high value on a university job, like, your dad or uncle was a physicist, or your family have lots of university connections. If you have a preexisting family background in phsyics or math or education, then you might slip into a reasonable social circle that respects your occupation, but for other people it can be a depressing thought that you don’t know how you’re going to meet women or make friends other than at conferences.
I have some really good, bright, friends with physics backgrounds but none of them went into it as a profession. I got the impression from a few of them that they’d felt that they didn’t “fit”.
Do you remember the outrage against Pons and Fleischmann?
I don’t have a personal position on whether what P&F found was really fusion or not, but it did seem to coincide with a fascinating potential loophole that suggested the possibility of room-temrperature fusion. Because it turns out that palladium has an absurdly high affinity for hydrogen, so that it sucks it in like a sponge and stores it in the gaps between its atoms at absurdly high equivalent pressures, and the hydrogen (or in this case duterium) isn’t just randomly aligned, it forms a series of regular networks whose larger-scale structure depends on the crystal structure of the metal … and this is a subject that we know damned little about, apart from … if you have a series of microcracks or defects in the metal, or convenient grain boundaries, the deuterium would be expected to line up in an orderly way that you don’t normally get with liqids orgases, so … you have something with some of the characteristics of crystalline solid deuterium, at room temperature and pressure, and that might totally change the statistical probability of two deuterium nucleii hitting each other as a “perfect strike”.
It’s like, if you have a reaction that needs two snooker balls to hit each other precisely head-on, dead centre, then that’s going to be desperately unlikely if the balls are moving about atrandom and you have a snooker table the size of a football field. But if you increase the density by a factor analogous to shrinking it back down to a tabletop, and you place sections of drainpipe on the table as guides so that so that the balls run preferentially along predefined paths, the odds of a clean strike between two moving balls runnign along the same channel change from absurdly low to a virtual certainty. Which is interesting.
I mean, nuclear phsyics isn’t my field, but some of the nuclear guys who were weighing in against P&F at the time didn’t have a clue as to how to validly criticise the experiment - some of them didn’t even seem to know that Palladium had a hydrogen affinity. They were talking about it as if it was just a standard generic metal electrode, and when the replication attempts failed, nobody seemed to be talking about the potentially critical microstructure issues.
Of course, if the P&F result had been right, and had been verified, a lot of those nuclear guys would have been seeing their existing expensive (underperforming) research projects being shut down and funds diverted, so perhaps it’s understandable that they might react with hostility to even the suggestion that something like P&F might be workable. If politicians even showed an interest in the possibility of funding a constellation of smaller, cheaper, fusion projects rather than believing that "tokamak was the only way to go, long-standing projects that people had put their lives into faced a strong possibility of being axed.
So to the “hot fusion” community, it was imperative that the P&F result be totally discredited, and quickly, and some of them didn’t seem to mind much how they went about it.
As I said I’m “neutral” over whether there really was an effect there or not, and I’m quite prepared to accept the possibility that there was nothing nuclear there to be found … but I thought that the way that the some of the community turned on P&F stank to high heaven. It was like watching a flock of seagulls attacking a sparrow.
The outrage against Pons and Fleischmann was because they were at best sloppy physicists who cared more about public acclimation than the scientific method, and at worst frauds and hucksters. A scientist can’t really be neutral about their results, because their results were simply flat-out wrong. If anything, they were a symptom of the sort of faulty thinking you yourself are decrying, but the physics community values those who are genuinely seeking the truth, not just those who are seeking public accolades. Even those physicists who get their funding from the Department of Defense (and there aren’t as many of them as you seem to think) are still generally more about the advancement of knowledge, and very little of their work actually relates directly to weapons.
If Pons and Fleischmann had been right, then those guys would have just built their own cold fusion apparatus and started working on it themselves, and gotten far more funding for that than they’d ever gotten before. In fact, many of them did attempt to build their own cold fusion apparatus, and the fact that it didn’t work when anyone else tried it was one of the many reasons we know that P&F were wrong.