Academia

Despite the fact that the arxiv has made it possible to disseminate papers well before they are sent to a journal, the process of anonymous peer review is still crucial to physics and the rest of science. Anyone who has at least a couple of published papers has appeared on the radar screen of various journals as a potential referee, and pretty soon the requests to review papers come fast and furious. And it’s not a matter of rubber-stamping; I’ve personally refereed about 100 papers, and recommended less than half of them for publication. Of course, individual referees can behave quite differently; editors like referees who will actually read the paper, are willing to reject it if it’s bad, and get the reviews back quickly. I used to be good at all three of those, although my record on the last point has deteriorated seriously of late.

Every paper sent to a journal like Physical Review (in all of its contemporary manifestations) is sent to a referee as a matter of course. It wasn’t always thus. The current issue of Physics Today has a great article about Albert Einstein’s run-in with the journal in 1936.

In his salad days, Einstein published in German journals such as Annalen der Physik, but he eventually switched to American journals after he moved to the U.S. He had published a couple of papers in the Physical Review, which were apparently accepted by editor John Tate without being sent to a referee. These included the famous Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen paper on nonlocality in quantum mechanics, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”

But in 1936 Einstein and Rosen submitted a paper on the existence of gravitational waves that struck Tate as suspicious, and he decided to send it to the referee. The Physics Today article reveals that the referee was relativist Howard Percy Robertson. Soon after the initial formulation of general relativity, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves by doing the obvious thing — examining the behavior of small fluctuations in the gravitational field using perturbation theory. But Einstein and Rosen had attempted to solve the full equations without any approximations, and were able to prove that there were no non-singular solutions; they therefore claimed that gravitational waves didn’t exist! Robertson figured out that they had made a classic error in GR — essentially, they had used a bad coordinate system. He wrote a ten-page report explaining why the conclusions of the paper were incorrect.

Einstein explained that he had submitted his paper for publication, not for refereeing.

Dear Sir,

We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the — in any case erroneous — comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

Respectfully,

P.S. Mr. Rosen, who has left for the Soviet Union, has authorized me to represent him in this matter.

After this incident, Einstein vowed never again to publish in Physical Review — and he didn’t. The Einstein-Rosen paper eventually appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, but its conclusions were dramatically altered — the authors chose new coordinates, and showed that they had actually discovered a solution for cylindrical gravitational waves, now known as the “Einstein-Rosen metric.” It’s a little unclear how exactly Einstein changed his mind — whether it was of his own accord, through the influence of the referee’s report, or by talking to Robertson personally. But it’s pretty clear that he would have loved the innovation of arxiv.org.

The immediate purpose of this post is tell search engines where to point when they’re asked about intelligent design. Steve Smith of the National Center for Science Education (a great organization, devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in schools) has sent around an email mentioning a surge of interest in the subject, seen for example in the list of top searches on Technorati (right now it’s the most popular search). So he suggests that people with a web page point to this article on Intelligent Design at the NCSE website; we physicists here at CV are happy to help out, as we know that we’re next once the forces of pseudo-science finish off our friends in the squishy sciences.

It’s an embarassment that something as empty as intelligent design gets taken at all seriously by so many people. Here’s an important feature of real scientists: they don’t try to win acceptance for their ideas by forcing people to teach them in high schools. They publish papers, give seminars, argue with other scientists at conferences. IDers don’t do this, because they have nothing scientific to offer. They don’t explain anything, they don’t make predictions, they don’t advance our understanding of the workings of nature. It’s religio-political dogma, so of course they pick battles with school boards instead of scientists.

In the discussion about the post on doctors below, some commenters pointed out that doctors aren’t really scientists at all. But the point was never that doctors are scientists; it was simply that they were people who went to college, where presumably they even took some biology courses. How is it possible for people to go through college and come out not appreciating enough about how science works that they can’t appreciate the metaphysical distinction between science and propaganda?

But much of this is our fault, where by “us” I refer to college science professors. We do an awful job at teaching science to non-scientists. I presume (and would love to hear otherwise if I’m wrong) that most U.S. colleges ask their students to take about one year’s worth of natural science (either physics, biology, astronomy, or chemistry) in order to graduate. But more often than not these courses don’t teach what they should. For some reason or another, we most often create intro courses for non-scientists by taking our intro courses for science majors and removing the hard parts. This is completely the wrong paradigm. What we should be doing is taking an entire professional scientific education (undergrad and grad school, including research) and squeeze the most important parts into courses for non-scientists. If someone only takes one physics course in college, they should certainly hear at least something about relativity and quantum mechanics. If someone takes only one biology course, they should certainly hear at least something about evolution and genetics. Instead we (often, anyway) bore them to death with inclined planes and memorizing anatomical parts. (Truth in advertising compels me to mention that, as an astronomy major, I made it through college without taking any courses in either biology or chemistry.)

And, most importantly of all: they should absolutely learn something about the practice of science. They should have some introduction to how theories are really proposed, experiments are performed, and choices are made between competing models. They should be told something about the criteria by which scientists choose one idea over another. It should be impressed upon them that science is a perpetually unfinished subject, where the real fun is at the edges of our ignorance where we don’t know all the answers — but that there are also well-established results that we have established beyond reasonable doubt, at least within their well-understood domains of validity.

Wouldn’t you like to take a science course like that? I don’t know, maybe my experiences have been atypical and there are a lot of people teaching courses in just that way. If so, let me know.

I am often surprised at the level of disdain and resentment with which string theory is viewed by non-string-theorists. I’m thinking not so much of people on the street, but of physicists, other scientists, and even other academics. As a physicist who is not personally identified as a string theorist, I get to hear all sorts of disparaging remarks about the field from experimental particle physicists, condensed matter physicists, astrophysicists, chemists, philosophers, and so on. I sometimes wonder whether most string theorists understand all the suspicion directed against them.

It shouldn’t be like this. String theory, with all of its difficulties, is by far the most promising route to one of the most long-lasting and ambitious goals of natural science: a complete understanding of the microscopic laws of nature. In particular, it is by far the most promising way to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics, the most important unsolved problem in fundamental physics. At the moment, it’s a notably incomplete and frustrating theory, but not without genuinely astonishing successes to its credit.

The basic idea is incredibly simple: instead of imagining that elementary particles are really fundamentally pointlike, imagine that they are one-dimensional loops or line segments — strings. Now just take that idea and try to make it consistent with the rules of relativity and quantum mechanics. Once you set off down this road, you are are inevitably led to a remarkably rich structure: extra dimensions, gauge theories, supersymmetry, new extended objects, dualities, holography, and who knows what else. Most impressively of all, you are led to gravity: one of the modes of a vibrating string corresponds to a massless spin-two particle, whose properties turn out to be that of a graviton. It’s really this feature that separates string theory from any other route to quantum gravity. In other approaches, you generally start with some way of representing curved spacetime and try to quantize it, soon getting more or less stuck. In string theory, you just say the word “strings,” and gravity leaps out at you whether you like it or not.

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Two cheers for string theoryRead More »