{"id":909,"date":"2006-12-12T10:26:27","date_gmt":"2006-12-12T10:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/12\/the-academic-scene\/"},"modified":"2006-12-12T10:26:27","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T10:26:27","slug":"the-academic-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/12\/the-academic-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"The Academic Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Dave Winer’s got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today<\/a>: “Where is the Bronx Science for adults?” He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school “was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my own age.” It’s harder to find this in adulthood, he observes, even as a fellow at the Berkman Center<\/a>, where Dave and I met four years ago.<\/p>\n

I empathize with Dave – the experience of being surrounded by smart people working on the same kinds of problems is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ethan and Dave both draw an analogy between the sort of collaboration they’re talking about and artistic and literary “scenes” in history, and even places like London during the birth of the Royal Society (as seen in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books, for example).<\/p>\n

This is one of the things I miss most about my research group in grad school. I used to spend a good chunk of every day hanging out with some of the very brightest physicists in the world, and I don’t think I’ve ever had as good a sense of physics as a whole as I did when I was there, and any major new development was hashed out either formally or informally over coffee in the computer room.<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking about Ethan’s post a lot lately, for a couple of reasons:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You might think that working in academia would be a good approximation of the sort of thing he’s talking about– after all, I spend my days working with a wide variety of really smart people, all doing cutting-edge research in their various fields. It doesn’t quite work out that way, though, just because the variety is too wide. For the most part, my colleagues even within the department do research in fields that are so widely separated that it’s really hard to have productive conversations about research. (And forget about other departments– I don’t even begin to understand what most of my colleagues in the humanities do with their days.)<\/p>\n

Every now and then, though, it happens, just a little bit. A week or two back, just after we started getting nice signals<\/a> from the test source apparatus, I spent an hour or so talking about the signals and how to interpret them with a colleague in the department who also has an AMO physics background. I explained what I was seeing, and suggested some possible interpretations, and he agreed with some of what I was saying, and pointed out a couple of things I had overlooked, and by the end of the conversation, I had a better idea of what was going on, as well as some ideas for three or four new experiments to try with the apparatus.<\/p>\n

It also reminded me of just how much fun this business can be, when you’ve got smart people working on similar problems. It’s been a while since I had that kind of interaction– my students are great, but it’s not the same.<\/p>\n

And that feeds into the other reason I have for thinking about this stuff these days: we’re currently reviewing folders for our tenure-track job search (something like 240 of them). When we put in the ad, we didn’t specifiy a research area, and thus we’ve ended up with applications from all sorts of different physicists and astronomers, working in all sorts of research areas from the very applied to the incredibly abstract.<\/p>\n

Given such a diverse candidate pool, it’s really hard to decide on what we’re looking for. On the one hand, it would be good to get somebody in a field that isn’t currently represented in the department. Someone with a background in condensed matter or solid state physics, for example, could teach classes that none of the permanent faculty are really comfortable with, and give our students some exposure to a wider range of physics than they would otherwise see.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, though, we could look at hiring somebody who does research that’s similar to work done by somebody who’s already here. This might not seem as beneficial for the students, but it could be a real boon for the faculty, providing mutually supporting research programs, and the sort of synergy of collaboration that Dave and Ethan were talking about. That can indirectly be of great benefit to the students, who make up for the loss of breadth with an increase in the depth of their understanding of one area of physics.<\/p>\n

It’s a tough call to make. Especially since there are a few strong candidates in the pool who do work very similar to things that I have done in the past. I look at their folders, and I can’t help thinking about how much fun it could be to have somebody to collaborate with on a regular basis…<\/p>\n

Of course, I’m sure my colleagues are all thinking the same thing, which means that sorting this whole business out is going to be a long and difficult process…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration: Dave Winer’s got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: “Where is the Bronx Science for adults?” He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school “was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my… Continue reading The Academic Scene<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","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=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}