In Anita Mehta’s collection of inconvenient truths, she chronicles the evolution of the physicist from a craftsman doing research for “pleasure rather than work” to a “physics professional” working for the research corporation that is the modern university. Having earned a bachelor’s in physics and a doctorate in psychology, I feel compelled and ever-so-slightly qualified to conclude that, if anything, Mehta has done us a disservice by being far too polite.
Mehta uses artful prose to address issues that already make many people uncomfortable. Her insights ring true. As she notes, the broad promise of early theoretical advances made by Renaissance men gave way to specialization in which the skills needed to solve problems became more important than the original thinking needed to recognize them. Mehta writes that too few people are allowed “the postdoctoral researcher’s birthright—the luxury of dreaming.” But she passes over a concurrent and inseparable phenomenon: the decline in the status of graduate students and postdocs from colleagues doing independent research to glorified laboratory assistants.
Specialization, Mehta writes, has brought coexisting but contradictory interpretations of nature, often achieved through computer simulations rather than experiments; that specialization has led to “the growing estrangement of subfields within physics.” Mehta courteously skirts the root cause of what she calls the “assembly-line mindset” and of all the other problems she notes: the advent of international competitiveness as the core motivation for science. In that realm, nations accumulate knowledge to gain economic and military advantage over perceived enemies or rivals. Remember that the money, although originating with the taxpayers, is ultimately doled out at the discretion of politicians.
With this in mind, we may answer a question that Mehta did not actually ask: When, exactly, did science cease to be a vocation? The answer is World War II, which spurred the notion that science could not only win a war but maintain a permanent technological, and hence economic, advantage. That sort of thinking created the factory mentality in which well-rounded intellects, as Mehta notes, are now actively deselected. The job market presently favors those who stay in the same academic discipline, finish their studies in record time, and thus bring the least perspective—and maturity—to the job. Generalists are not wanted; familiarity with the programming code of the day is now more important than being able to think outside the box.
Mehta also notes the “stifling of merit by politics,” the small-scale corruption of winks, nods, and handshakes that no one wants to acknowledge. Ultimately, she concludes that physics “became a business with very small stakes.” But in that she is dead wrong. Physics, as a largely tax-funded and multibillion-dollar enterprise, became a business with truly enormous stakes: the very supremacy of the old colonial nations. And therein lies the problem.