Academia

Imagine All the Learning

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Harvard University is once again re-thinking its basic curriculum for undergraduates (via PZ). This matters, of course, since Harvard is unanimously recognized as the World’s Greatest University (or at least that’s what they told me when I was there). Opinions differ, as you might expect, about what should be the basic course of study we expect to be mastered by every student obtaining a bachelor’s degree at an accredited college or university. At a place like St. John’s College, every student takes exactly the same classes — and every professor is expected to teach every class, from Physics to Classics. At the other end of the spectrum, some places basically allow students to choose their own course of study, without any specifically required courses.

Most academics feel that what they went through as a student is right for everyone, and in this case I’m no exception. I went to a upright Catholic institution, where the required core curriculum was substantially lengthier than anything you’ll come across in the Ivy League. There were requirements in all the canonical disciplines of the liberal arts and sciences, with some degree of flexibility within each category. I think it’s a good system; undergraduates don’t necessarily know best about what they might like to learn (who does?), and sometimes even things that you don’t enjoy might be good for you.

So here is the curriculum I would insist on if I were the Emperor of Learning. The courses every college undergraduate should take:

  • Two semesters of English Literature. (No specific writing requirement, but writing would be emphasized in many of the courses across the board.)
  • Three semesters of History, at least one of American history and one of non-American history.
  • Some degree of proficiency in a foreign language, as measured by some standardized test.
  • Two semesters of Philosophy or Religious Studies.
  • Three semesters of Social Sciences, at least one but not all to be in Economics.
  • Two semesters of Mathematics, either a year of Calculus or one semester each of Statistics and Algebra/Geometery at a fairly high level.
  • Two semesters of Physical Science — Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.
  • Two semesters of Biological Science.
  • One semester of Fine Arts.

(At Villanova there was no fine arts requirement, and only one year of science was required. But we had to take three semesters of Philosophy and three semesters of Religious Studies.) I don’t think I would require any non-English literature, as reading in translation is fun but not necessarily central. I also wouldn’t require any lab component to the science courses, which I’m sure will cause howls of outrage. I believe firmly in the importance of experiment and that the scientific method is grounded in empirical exploration etc. etc. But I also know from experience that every lab course that I either took myself or served as a TA for, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. They served mostly to turn students off of science forever. Maybe I have simply been unlucky, but lab courses would require some deep re-thinking before I would include them in the required curriculum.

Let’s see, four years of college, two semesters per year, four courses per semester means that a student will take at least 32 courses as an undergraduate (they are welcome to take more courses per semester, of course). The above list comes to 17 courses, at least if they’re lucky enough to test out of the language requirement. Imagine that a typical major (or “concentration,” as they say at the WGU) insists on 10 courses in that discipline; but any given discipline will probably cover two semesters worth of the above requirements, so really only 8 more required courses. That gives a total of 25 required courses, leaving 7 completely free electives. They could be taken within the student’s major, or anywhere else. So everyone gets one course almost every semester just to have fun. (Double majors would likely require students to take extra courses; worse things could happen.)

While I think it’s good to demand that students take a long list of breadth requirements, I would be extremely flexible when it came to the required courses for a major. If I were in charge, every student could design their own major by proposing a program of study of 10 or more courses that somehow hung together to form a sensible story, even if it didn’t fit comfortably within any of the existing academic departments. So you could major in biological physics, or philosophical psychology, or the history of ideas, or German studies, or what have you. A standing committee of the University would judge all such proposals for coherence and rigor, and the successful student would be awarded a B.A. or B.S. in whatever they called their made-up program. (None of this is exactly original, to be sure.)

Different strokes for different folks, of course. Even if I were Emperor, I wouldn’t want the same set of requirements to hold at every university; a great strength of our decentralized system of higher education is that individual schools can serve as laboratories for innovation, which is a feature rather than a bug. At Caltech every undergraduate is required to take a year of calculus-based physics, for example; that probably wouldn’t work for everybody. (They also don’t admit people as English majors, although you’re allowed to switch into “Humanities” if you make that choice once you are here. Not sure what social pressures such people must feel.) But I still believe in the ideal of a broadly-based education in the liberal arts and sciences, where everyone who graduates from college knows something about the theory of evolution, the history of the Roman Empire, the law of supply and demand, and the categorical imperative. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

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But We Feel Good About Ourselves

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Chet Raymo, who for years wrote very enjoyable science columns for the Boston Globe, has a blog called Science Musings that is well worth checking out. He posts today about an article in the Atlantic, derived in turn from this report, that compares the mathematical performance of U.S. students to those in various Asian countries.

(I wonder if the Australian scores were collected before or after Mark got there?) Now, self-confidence is a good thing, all else being equal. But being educated well is also a good thing. It’s no secret that we don’t train our teachers well, provide schools with proper resources, or challenge our students enough in the classroom. Maybe there’s something we can learn from what’s going on in Asia.

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The Nerd-Off

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Dr. Free-Ride is trying to goad us into proclaiming our nerdliness. Various science bloggers are having a friendly competition to see who is the nerdliest of them all, and she wants to know why CV isn’t represented.

Regrettably, I’m going to pass on this one. (Not that I couldn’t put up a respectable showing, since past indiscretions are apparently fair game; I loved my old RPN Hewlett-Packard calculator, and I’ll put the glasses I wore in high school up against anyone’s.) It’s just that I’m not entirely on board with the program of reclaiming “nerdliness” as a badge of honor, as gays have managed to reclaim queer and so forth.

Words like “nerd” or “geek” have two very different sets of connotations, and it’s hard to evoke one without the other. One has to do with technical mastery and know-how, or even a more broadly-based appreciation for things academic and intellectual. The other has to do with social awkwardness, the inability to comfortably converse with strangers at cocktail parties, and a tendency to dress in the least attractive way possible.

Roughly speaking, the first of these connotations is “good,” and the second is “bad.” But they’re both problematic. Nobody would be happier than me if we could somehow increase society’s appreciation for people with technical skills, and eliminate the defensive dismissal that so many people fall back on when confronted with math or science or computers. (There are only so many times you can tell people what you do for a living, only to hear “That was my worst subject in high school.”) So in that very particular sense, I’m all in favor of celebrating nerdliness. But for me it’s very much a part of what should be a general appreciation for intellectual endeavor, whether technically oriented or not. And as a matter of personal experience, I’ve found science and engineering types to be at least as anti-intellectual as the average person on the street, when it comes to non-technical kinds of scholarship. Naturally, there are plenty of pro-intellectual types, among people with and without technical backgrounds. That geek cred, however, lends a special kind of bite to know-nothingness when it rears its ugly head; someone with a Ph.D. in physics can not only dismiss philosophy or art or literature as airy nonsense, they can compare it directly and unfavorably to their own sphere of competence. And they do.

But it’s the social-backwardness aspect of being a nerd that is the biggest problem. You can protest all you want that you’re really talking about technical competence, not lack of social fluency, but the latter comes immediately to mind whenever anyone hears talk about nerds and geeks. Wikipedia spells it out:

Nerd, as a stereotypical or archetypal designation, refers to somebody who pursues academic and intellectual interests at the expense of social skills such as: interpersonal communication, fashion, and physical fitness.

What is worse, there’s a certain point of view (I won’t name names … some of my best friends are nerds) that actually celebrates social awkwardness for its own sake. (Trust me about this, I’ve been employed by both MIT and Caltech.) And that’s just wrong. I’m not talking about principled eccentricity, letting your freak flag fly — nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s admirable in its own way. Nor am I saying that everyone should be scouring the latest issues of GQ and Vogue for fashion tips; superficiality is just as bad as nerdliness. And laughing at our high-school (and college) selves is always fun and healthy. All I’m saying is that there is much to be valued in an ability to relate to other kinds of people in a disparate set of circumstances, take care of your appearance, and function effectively in a wider social context. These are skills we should try to cultivate, not disparage.

The point is that these two aspects of nerdliness operate against each other. If we want the rest of the world to appreciate technical skills, then we should work to eradicate the notion that they are necessarily associated with a lack of social skills. And that’s the connotation of “nerd,” like it or not. Celebrating knowledge and competence and intellectual curiosity is good, but celebrating nerdliness sends the wrong message, I would argue. There’s no reason why someone who programs in assembly and is deft with a contour integral can’t also be a well-rounded and engaging conversationalist who is at all the gallery openings and whom everyone wants at their parties — that’s the message we want to send.

What a killjoy, huh? In my defense, if you’d been sleeping on a concrete floor for the last several days, waiting for your furniture to arrive, you’d be grumpy too.

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Summer School

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Eavesdrop on an informal gathering of professional cosmologists, and you might hear them debating the relative merits of different strategies for measuring the dark energy equation-of-state parameter. Or they might be talking about which department is trying to steal whom away from where, the questionable competence of different funding agency administrators, or which airline has the best frequent-flyer program. Here is a question you won’t hear very often: “Did space and time exist before the Big Bang, and if not, can we make sense of the existence of our universe without invoking the presence of God?” But students will happily talk about such things — they haven’t yet figured out that they’re not supposed to. That’s why, when one finds oneself lecturing along with one’s colleagues at a summer school for physicists, it’s much more fun to hang out with the students.

I’m spending this week at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, an historic town overlooking the Adriatic Sea at the border of Italy and Slovenia. The ICTP is a little bit older than me, founded in in 1964 by Abdus Salam, who shared the Nobel Prize with Glashow and Weinberg in 1979 for their unified theory of the weak interactions and electromagnetism. Salam, from Pakistan, was committed to bringing modern science to developing countries, and an important mission of the ICTP is to collect scientists from around the world into one place to exchange ideas. It’s not hard to coax busy researchers into visiting Trieste, as you might guess from this view of the Adriatico Guest House where most of us are staying.

ICTP Adriatico guest house

I’ve been lecturing on introductory cosmology and the early universe at a summer school organized by Uros Seljak and Paolo Creminelli. The school spans quite a range of topics, from Tom Abel talking about early star formation to Alex Vilenkin talking about the multiverse. Five or six hours of lectures a day over the course of the two-week school keep everyone busy — for anyone out there wondering whether a career as an academic is for them, ask yourselves whether taking notes on talks about structure formation and linear perturbation theory sounds like a fun way to spend your summer vacation.

Admittedly, a salt mine it’s not — it’s a social occasion as well, in a gorgeous setting, and well, most of us manage to take advantage of the surroundings in our downtime. Yesterday evening Uros, who was born and lives nearby in Slovenia, took some of the lecturers out on his small boat (photos forthcoming, if I can get my camera to talk to my computer) to a seafood restaurant up the coast, where we enjoyed a light Italian repast. That is to say, over the course of several hours the server chose for us a substantial selection of antipasti (cozze, mussels, caught within sight of the restaurant, were the featured ingredient), followed by heaping plates of pasta, leading eventually to fresh grilled dorade and sea bass over vegetables, and concluding ultimately with biscotti dipped in sweet wine. Carafes of prosecco were produced to help keep the food going down smoothly. I was ready to push away from the table and stumble back to the guest house when the proprietess arrived with a bottle of grappa and a collection of shot glasses. We soldiered on.

As much as I do enjoy the company of my colleagues, however, the true joy was the previous evening, when I inserted myself into a group of students (mostly graduates from various countries of Europe) for drinks after an afternoon dinner reception. Starting with God and the Big Bang, we enjoyed the kind of good old-fashioned bull session in which college students regularly indulge, but which becomes increasingly less frequent as we grow old and settled in our opinions. Can you be a good physicist without knowing general relativity? What is the proper ratio of gin to vermouth in a dry martini? Does slow-roll inflation necesarily predict a nearly scale-free spectrum of primordial perturbations? What are the crucial differences between Croatian and Bulgarian accents? Why would anyone prefer The Animals’ version of I Put a Spell on You to the original by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins?

There is no occupation, from fighter pilot to professional hockey player to homicide detective, that is completely free from the danger of creeping professionalism — an adaptation to the customs and techniques of the discipline so thorough as to render the marvelous routine, pushing the sources of awe and wonder to the background in favor of more pressing and mundane concerns. It’s good to be reminded now and then of the open-minded stance toward the deep questions of the universe that originally motivates people to plunge into such a wildly impractical occupation as “professional cosmologist.” My deep thanks to Lyuba, Lily, Kai, Leonardo, Arti, Guillermo, Alex, Dominika, and all the other students at the school here in Trieste, for providing such vivid examples of why we all become scientists in the first place.

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The View of the Universe from the South Side of Chicago

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This last term I taught Introduction to Cosmology, a course for graduate students at the University of Chicago (although some undergrads typically do take it). While I have been known to pass myself off as a professional cosmologist, I’ve never found it a particularly easy course to teach. The straightforward reason is that it’s a big universe out there, and not much time to cover it. The UofC is on a quarter system, so a term is only ten weeks of classes; this makes it hard to squeeze in as much material as you would be able to in an ordinary semester.

More importantly, though, cosmology is a mess. Unlike most other subjects that would have a course devoted to them, there is no sense in which cosmology is a single logical structure that is built up from a small number of axioms. To discuss various crucial topics, you need to bring in general relativity, thermodynamics, particle physics, astrophysics, and occasionally the kitchen sink. In particular, neither GR nor particle physics are prerequisites for taking the course, so the basics of those subjects need to be covered when necessary.

A substantial fraction of contemporary cosmology is devoted to investigating structure formation and the cosmic microwave background. To do those subjects any justice requires not only the basics of general relativity, but a pretty well-grounded understanding of relativistic perturbation theory, which is an intricate and subtle discipline all its own. So the prospective cosmology instructor has a choice: go whole-hog in doing structure formation and perturbation theory, skipping past many of the fun topics in early-universe cosmology, or do the converse, putting some effort into inflation and relic abundances and nucleosynthesis while waving hands briefly about large-scale structure and the CMB. Since there is a separate cosmology course taught in the Astronomy department, which inevitably concentrates on structure formation and the CMB, I chose the latter route. We covered the basics of general relativity (enough to derive the Friedmann equation for the expansion of the universe) and particle physics (enough to understand the basics of cross-sections and calculate relic abundances). Hopefully, the students who don’t decide to become full-time working cosmologists will nonetheless, ten or twenty years down the line, recall the basic ideas of how to calculate the density of a dark matter candidate or why primordial nucleosynthesis provides such strong constraints on the physics of the early universe.

There were problem sets every week, but no final exam. Instead, the students each wrote a final paper, and the good news is that you get to read them. The final papers have been put on a web page (as pdf files), and you could do much worse by way of reviewing the hot topics in current cosmology research than to read through these papers. (The indended audience for the papers was “people who have just taken this course,” so they do tend to get a little technical.) In the past I’ve asked each student to pick a somewhat narrow topic and do a little review on it. This year, as an experiment, I instead asked them to find one specific research paper that had appeared in the past year or so, and write an overview of it that explained the main results as well as some of the background. Topics include:

  • Nucleosynthesis contstraints on the variation of constants
  • Origin of cosmological magnetic fields
  • Alternatives to dark energy
  • Anomalies in the cosmic microwave background
  • Methods for probing cosmic acceleration
  • Properties of perturbations generated by inflation
  • Thermal field theory in the early universe
  • Quantum-computational cosmology
  • Characterizing CMB polarization
  • The quantum vacuum and the cosmological constant
  • Origin of supermassive black holes
  • The birth of the universe in string theory
  • Searches for dark matter
  • The topology of the universe
  • Limits on primordial gravitational waves

Overall, they did a fantastic job, and I’m proud to share the results with the wider world.

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Physicists with Guns

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There’s an interesting discussion at Pharyngula and Uncertain Principles about a high-school physics teacher in California who is in trouble for firing a gun as part of a classroom demonstration. It’s interesting because it opposes two principles to which we bleeding-heart liberal academic types will generally be sympathetic: “guns are dangerous” vs. “teachers should be free to make their classes interesting and exciting.” In the comments it’s very clear that, not only are people disagreeing, but they find folks on the other side to be slightly nutso.

I’m happy to come down on the side of an interesting classroom in this case. Guns can certainly be dangerous, and we have some cultural issues here in the U.S. that cause special problems that most other countries don’t have. It’s far too easy for the wrong people to have guns, especially handguns and assault rifles and other darlings of the NRA. But it goes way too far to extrapolate to the idea that the very concept of a gun is somehow evil, and that the things should be banned entirely.

Ballistic Pendulum

The teacher, David Lapp, demonstrates the ballistic pendulum experiment each year by shooting a bullet into a block of wood. By measuring the block’s recoil, you can figure out the velocity of the bullet using conservation of momentum. (Or “inertia, velocity and other complex formulae,” as the newspaper article would have it.) Sure, there are ways to do it without using a rifle, but a demonstration like this makes the experiment come alive for a lot of students.

Many commenters in PZ and Chad’s threads are absolutist about the issue, insisting that any appearance of a gun in a classroom is completely insane. But the basic arguments against allowing the gun are pretty simple: either (1) there is a safety risk in having a gun in the classroom, or (2) it sends the wrong message to kids to let them see guns. I think (1) is blown substantially out of proportion. Imagine, in any of these arguments, replacing “gun” with “a dangerous thing.” Should there be an absolute prohibition against every dangerous thing in a classroom? No hazardous chemicals, no driver’s ed, no power tools in shop class? Dangerous things should be handled with care, but that shouldn’t lead to a complete loss of perspective.

The second argument, that simply letting the kids see a gun up close leads to familiarity and it’s a short step from there to Columbine, has it exactly backwards. The reason why American students go to college and engage in frequent binge drinking and other irresponsible behavior isn’t because they are exposed to alcohol too much in high school — it’s because the concept of underage drinking is a taboo that they can’t wait to violate. In other countries where children are allowed to drink in responsible amounts in a respectable context, there isn’t any outlaw romance associated with the concept of getting completely plastered once you escape from your family, and the rampant alcohol abuse that U.S. colleges have to deal with is much less widespread. I’d be very happy if the total number of firearms in American households were dramatically lower than it is, but I’d also be happy if kids were taught basic gun safety, and thought of them as tools to be used properly rather than toys out of movies and comic books.

And if they learn some conservation of momentum and other “complex formulae” in the process, so much the better.

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The Future of Theoretical Cosmology

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I’m back from an extraordinarily hectic yet unusually rewarding April Meeting of the American Physical Society in Dallas. The APS has two big meetings each year, the April meetings for very large- and small-scale types (particle physics, nuclear physics, gravitation, astrophysics), and the March meeting for medium-scale types (condensed matter, atomic physics, biophysics). The March meeting is a crucially important event for its constituency, while the April meeting suffers from too much competition and far less customer loyalty, and is correspondingly a much smaller conference (perhaps 1,000-1,500 attendees, as opposed to 6,000 at a typical March meeting). That’s a subject for another post, for those of you out there with an unhealthy interest in APS politics.

(For other reports from the meeting, see Jennifer Ouellette’s Cocktail Party Physics or the mysterious and anonymous Charm &c. Common refrain: “It’s 2006! Why isn’t there decent wireless in this hotel??!!”)

There’s a rule to the effect that any person can give no more than one invited talk at an APS meeting, but such rules are made to be broken and I sneaked in there with two talks. One was a general overview of the accelerating universe and its associated problems, at a special session on Research Talks Aimed at Undergraduates. Having a session devoted to undergrads was a splendid idea, although I suspect that the median age of attendees at my talk was something like 45. That’s because, when asked to pitch a talk to an audience of level of expertise x, most physicists will end up pitching it at a level of expertise x+3. So various people with Ph.D.’s concluded that their best chance of understanding a talk outside their specialty was to attend a session for undergraduates. Perhaps they were right. Before my talk they got to hear nice presentations by Florencia Canelli on particle physics and the top quark, and Paul Chaikin on packing ellipsoids. (Okay, “packing ellipsoids” doesn’t sound like the sexiest topic, but it was filled with fascinating tidbits of information. Did you know that both prolate and oblate ellipsoids pack more efficiently than spheres? That ordered crystalline packings are generally found to be more efficient than random packings, but nobody can prove it in general? That M&M’s are extremely reliable ellipsoids, to better than 0.1%? That the method by which the Mars Corporation makes their M&M’s so regular is a closely guarded secret?)

My other talk was at a joint double session on the past, present, and future of cosmology, co-sponsored by the Division of Astrophysics and the Forum for the History of Physics. Six talks naturally needed to be given: one each on the past/present/future of observational/theoretical cosmology, and organizer Virginia Trimble invited me to speak on The Future of Theoretical Cosmology. The observational session conflicted with my talk to the “undergrads,” but I got to hear the talks on the past and present of theory by Helge Kragh and David Spergel, respectively.

Of course nobody has any idea what the future of theoretical cosmology will be like, given that we know neither what future experiments will tell us, nor what ideas future theorists will come up with. So I defined “the future” to be “100 years from now,” by which time I figured (1) I won’t be around, or (2) if I am around it will be because we will all be living in pods and communicating via the Matrix, and nobody will be all that interested in what I said about the future of cosmology a century earlier.

interactive dark sector

With those caveats in mind, I did try to make some prognostications about how we will be thinking about three kinds of cosmological issues: composition questions, origins questions, and evolution questions. You can peek at my slides in html or pdf, although I confess that many were cannibalized from other talks. The abbreviated version:

  • Composition Questions. We have an inventory of the universe consisting of approximately 4% ordinary matter, 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy. But each of these components is mysterious: we don’t know what the dark matter or dark energy really are, nor why there is more matter than antimatter. My claim was that we will have completely understood these questions in 100 years. In each case, there is an active experimental program aimed at providing us with clues, so I’m optimistic that the matter will be closed long before then.
  • Origins Questions. Where did the universe come from, and why do we find it in this particular configuration? Inflation, which received an important boost from the recent WMAP results, is a crucial ingredient in our current picture, but I stressed that there is a lot that we don’t yet understand. In particular, we need to understand the pre-inflationary universe to know whether inflation really provides a robust theory of initial conditions. Thinking about inflation naturally leads us to the multiverse, and I argued that untestable predictions of a theory are perfectly legitimate science, so long as the theory makes other testable predictions. We don’t yet have a theory of quantum gravity that does that, and I prevaricated about whether one hundred years would be sufficient time to establish one. (Naive extrapolation predicts that we won’t be doing Planck-scale experiments until two hundred years from now.)
  • Evolution Questions. Given the initial conditions, we already understand the evolution of small perturbations up to the point where they become large (“nonlinear”). That’s when numerical simulations become crucial, and here I was a little more bold. The very idea of a computer simulation is only about 50 years old, so there’s every reason to expect that the way in which computers are used will look completely different 100 years from now. Quantum computers will be commonplace, and enable parallel processing of enormous power. More interestingly, the types of computation that we’ll be doing will be dramatically different; I suggested that the computers will not only be running simulations to test theories against observations, but will be coming up with theories themselves. Such a prospect is a natural outgrowth of the idea of genetic algorithms, so I don’t think it’s as crazy as it sounds.

The next day I managed to catch no fewer than three sessions filled with provocative talks — one on ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, one on cosmology and gravitational physics, and one on precision cosmology. And I would tell you all about them if I hadn’t lost the keys to my special time-stretching machine that allows me to put aside my day job for arbitrarily long periods so that I can blog at leisure. Probably the most intriguing suggestions were those by Shamit Kachru from SLAC, who argued that considerations from string theory (and in particular the constraint that scalar fields cannot evolve by amounts greater than the Planck scale) imply that gravitational waves produced by inflation will never be strong enough to be observable in the CMB, and those by David Saltzberg from UCLA, who listed an amazing variety of upcoming experiments to detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, including listening for sound waves (!) produced when a neutrino interacts with ocean water off the Bahamas. If I decide to become an experimentalist, that’s the one I’m joining.

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Dr. Doom

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This story is so amazing/silly/horrifying that it’s taken a few days to sink in. Short version: Dr. Eric Pianka of the University of Texas, an internationally recognized ecologist, goes around giving talks warning that the Earth is in major trouble. We’re headed for an ecological disaster, and human beings in particular are in serious danger of being wiped out by a deadly virus like Ebola, perhaps leading to the death of 90% of our current population. It might even be good for the environment over all (although bad for us, obviously). He’s an alarmist, no doubt about it, but it’s better to hear about such disaster scenarios than to simply ignore them.

And then — and here’s the part that is so bizarre that it takes a while to really believe it — “citizen scientist” and creationist Forrest Mims apparently heard Pianka give a talk, and decided that Pianka is advocating that we release a virus to kill 90% of the Earth’s population. Completely untrue, of course; just a simple-minded and mean-spirited twisting of the guy’s words. Even from the original story, you could tell that there was a serious disconnect between portrayal and reality — the actual quotes from Pianka didn’t measure up to the surrounding alarmist hysteria.

But the right-wing/creationist blogosphere has gone completely nutso over this. I thought my fellow left-wing/scientific friends might be exaggerating the reaction a bit, but it’s true — dozens of posts about the crazy “Dr. Doom” who longs to bring down our civilization through bioterrorism. ID advocate (and tireless defender of academic freedom!) William Dembski has taken the obvious step for someone who is unhinged but nevertheless concerned — he has reported Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security. A good summary of the craziness has been written by Nick Matzke at the Panda’s Thumb; more coverage from PZ Myers (and here), Ed Brayton, Wesley Elsberry (and here), and DarkSyde (and here).

There’s a lesson here, although damned if I can figure out what it is. PZ thinks that these people are just anti-academic, and that it’s part of a campaign to discredit the very notion of expertise. But I suspect that it’s less calculated than that — we’re talking about folks who find it completely plausible to imagine that liberal biology professors are eager to wipe out most of the human race. The basic cognitive short-circuit seems to be an inability to understand the difference between a sentiment of the form “A human population of one billion is more ecologically sustainable than one of six billion” and something like “I would like to personally murder five out of every six living people.” It’s the right-wing equivalent of people who think that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by Halliburton and/or the Mossad. Except that it’s not a fringe movement; the buzz is all over the right hemiblogosphere, and was straightforwardly reported by Matt Drudge and others.

Next time I mention that a decay of our vacuum state via bubble nucleation could wipe out life on Earth, I’ll make sure there aren’t any creationists in the audience. I can’t imagine explaining that to the Department of Homeland Security.

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Unsolicited advice, Part Deux: Choosing a grad school

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Our first installment of unsolicited advice concerned the difficult question of how to get into graduate school; this one presumes that one has successfully leapt the hurdles of GRE’s and ornery admissions committees, and is faced with the perilous decision of which offer to accept. (If one has either one or zero offers, presumably the decision-making process is somewhat easier.) We will not, at the moment, be addressing whether you should be going to graduate school in the first place, or how to succeed once you get there. [Update: see also How to Be a Good Graduate Student.]

This is a much more difficult task than the first installment. Not that it’s more difficult to decide where to go than to get into grad school in the first place; just that it’s much more difficult to give sensible advice about how to do it. When it comes to getting into grad schools, everyone agrees on the basic notions: good grades, test scores, letters, research experience. Choosing where to go, in contrast, is a highly personal decision, and what works for one person might be utterly irrelevant to someone else. Rather than being overly prescriptive, then, I thought it might be useful just to chat about some of the issues that come up. Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourself how to weigh the various factors.

  • Why do you want to go to grad school in the first place? Sure, maybe you should have already given some thought to this question — but now is the time to get serious. Is your goal to become a professor or other professional researcher (which is typically assumed)? Or is it just to get a Ph.D., and then see what happens? Or is it simply to learn some science?

    As a general principle, the purpose of grad school is very different from that of your undergraduate college education. At least in the U.S., college serves multiple purposes: training in some concentration, to be sure, but also a broadly-based liberal education, as well as more general exposure to critical thinking, and crucially important social and personal aspects. Grad school is much more focused: it serves to train you how to be a working research scientist (or whatever, although I’ll be speaking as if it is science you’ll be studying, as that’s what I know best). In college it’s good to be a broad person and cast your net widely in the oceans of learning and experience. In grad school, however, there is a lot to be said for focusing as much as you can on the specific discipline in which you are specializing. Not that you should stop having broad interests, but it might make sense to sacrifice some of them temporarily to the goal of becoming an expert researcher.

    The reason for this is that, like it or not, you are entering a competition. Not necessarily grad school itself (where grading and suchlike are notoriously relaxed, although there may be competition for advisors and fellowships and such), but the ultimate job market. Most people who go to grad school want to get jobs as scientists, probably in academia. There are far fewer such jobs than there are grad students, so most people who get a Ph.D. will ultimately not succeed in becoming professors. And the other people who want those jobs are also very smart and dedicated. So, if you are serious about choosing this as your life’s path, it makes sense to really devote yourself to your craft during your grad school years, and give it your best shot. I personally think that the rigorous training provided by a Ph.D. is extremely useful and rewarding even if you don’t become a professor, but you should certainly enter the fray with open eyes.

    If becoming a professor is what you want to do, you should choose your school accordingly. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that your life doesn’t completely end just because you’re in grad school, nor that the process itself should be unpleasant. It should be extremely challenging, taking you to the limits of what you are capable of doing — but the days you spend in school are also days that you are alive, and you shouldn’t completely shut yourself away. That’s the difficult balance to strike. (Told you this wouldn’t be very helpful.)

    • …

    Unsolicited advice, Part Deux: Choosing a grad schoolRead More »

Unsolicited advice, Part Deux: Choosing a grad school Read More »

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