{"id":5134,"date":"2010-10-23T15:49:10","date_gmt":"2010-10-23T15:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/10\/23\/science-is-solitary\/"},"modified":"2010-10-23T15:49:10","modified_gmt":"2010-10-23T15:49:10","slug":"science-is-solitary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/10\/23\/science-is-solitary\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Is Solitary?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time back, I took issue with an article about “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to science<\/a> that struck me as a little off. The author of the original post, Alexandra Jellicoe, has a new post on the same topic<\/a> that she pointed out in comments to my original post.<\/p>\n

I have two major problems with this article. One of them is a problem I have with the whole genre (as it were), and I’ll save that for another time, because it will be difficult to write. The bigger and more immediate problem that I have, though, is that I don’t recognize Jellicoe’s description of science. She writes:<\/p>\n

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The whole structure of science is biased towards this more masculine approach to problem solving. You have a professor looking for the truth in his chosen scientific subject and he commands his researchers to solitarily go out, find the answers and report back. As many people may be looking for the same truth, it fosters a culture of secrecy and competitiveness. Your work is only revealed when you have gone through the painful peer review process of publishing in a journal and beaten your competitors to the punch. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s kind of hard to imagine anything more foreign to my experience of science. There was never any point, from my undergrad days on up through my post-doc, when I felt that physics was a solitary endeavor.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As an undergrad, I always worked with other people on problem sets. In my first couple of years, I worked with a couple of guys who had lived in the same freshman dorm with me. After that, there was a group of 3-5 of us who used to get together in the Physics library and do homework. Talking through problems as a group helped us all understand things better than any of us could’ve done alone.<\/p>\n

My undergrad thesis project involved another student in my class, who was available for moral support, lab assistance, and to beat my high scores on the freeware video games we had on the office computers. There were also other students doing research, and even the faculty were around to provide help and suggestions.<\/p>\n

In grad school, I studied for my qualifying exams with the other students in my program. We used to get together a few times a week to work through some of the sample tests the department had made available, and generally try to soothe each other’s anxiety about the test.<\/p>\n

After I was finished with classes, my lab work was done in the Laser Cooling Group at NIST, and I don’t think there was any period longer than a month or so when I was really on my own. There were always post-docs assigned to the same project I was, and the experiments were done as a team. I don’t think I ever wrote a paper with fewer than four co-authors, and none of them were purely courtesy authors– all of them had been in the lab, doing the work (or crunching numbers on the theory).<\/p>\n

The larger Laser Cooling Group was also a helpful community. There were five different experiments running during the time I was there, each with a handful of post-docs and permanent staff. Whenever I had a problem in the lab, I had a large group of people to consult about solutions, and I was often dragged into debates about some aspect of another experiment (as the lone grad student in the group, I had a longer history with the apparatus than anyone other than the permanent staff).<\/p>\n

After graduating, I was a post-doc on a project with two graduate students. Each of the four different sub-groups in my boss’s lab was organized the same way: post-doc, senior grad student, junior grad student. All of those people were around to talk to, ask advice from, or bounce ideas off. And there were two other atomic physics groups in the basement with us, who also provided helpful discussion.<\/p>\n

There was never any point in my training when I felt like I had to “solitarily go out, find the answers and report back.” I was always working as part of a larger group working on similar problems, and the discussion with others was invaluable.<\/p>\n

So, her description of what women want from science:<\/p>\n

\n

Women also tend to communicate more effectively than men, talking through issues and show empathy towards each other whereas men tend to be more task-oriented, less talkative, and more isolated. This is something I personally struggled with enormously whilst doing my own scientific research. My own method of problem solving is to talk to as many people as possible about a particular issue to assist in unravelling my own thinking. I choose people with relevant experience whose judgement I trust. Left to my own devices and without access to this tool I find reaching decisions enormously challenging and actually very stressful. I would much rather use the community brain to reach a collective decision to act on rather than have to make autocratic decisions on my own. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

looks a whole lot like what my experience was. Which leaves me wondering where the problem is.<\/p>\n

Now, I’m aware that AMO physics is an unusually collegial community within physics (we talked about this at a recent DAMOP, and one post-doc told a story of a European post-doc who came into the community from another subfield, and started engaging in some aggressive behavior at a conference. During the coffee break, he was pulled aside by a couple of the most prominent researchers in his country, who explained that We Don’t Do That Sort of Thing Here). But, honestly, I don’t get this war-of-all-against-all vibe from much of anybody in physics– some particle theory types are arrogant and prickly, but this is the community that gave us the arxiv<\/a>, which grew out of community-wide discussion of preliminary results. This is such an extreme difference that it’s difficult to map onto my experience at all, and leaves me wondering whether Jellicoe just stumbled into a particularly pathological lab or branch of science.<\/p>\n

If not, if this is really the norm in other fields, let me just say this: Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics is here for you, if you want to come somewhere with a saner community ethic. It’s not a complete utopia, but it’s not a Hobbesian state of nature, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some time back, I took issue with an article about “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to science that struck me as a little off. The author of the original post, Alexandra Jellicoe, has a new post on the same topic that she pointed out in comments to my original post. I have two major problems with… Continue reading Science Is Solitary?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-science","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}