Monthly Archives: April 2020

The Academic Workflow (Or Lack Thereof)

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I was chatting with someone in biotech recently, who was frustrated with the current state of coronavirus research. The problem, in her view, was that researchers were approaching the problem in too “academic” a way. Instead of coordinating, trying to narrow down to a few approaches and make sure they get the testing they need, researchers were each focusing on their own approach, answering the questions they thought were interesting or important without fitting their work into a broader plan. She thought that a more top-down, corporate approach would do much better.

I don’t know anything about the current state of coronavirus research, what works and what doesn’t. But the conversation got me thinking about my own field.

Theoretical physics is about as far from “top-down” as you can get. As a graduate student, your “boss” is your advisor, but that “bossiness” can vary from telling you to do specific calculations to just meeting you every so often to discuss ideas. As a postdoc, even that structure evaporates: while you usually have an official “supervisor”, they won’t tell you what to do outside of the most regimented projects. Instead, they suggest, proposing ideas they’d like to collaborate on. As a professor, you don’t have this kind of “supervisor”: while there are people in charge of the department, they won’t tell you what to research. At most, you have informal hierarchies: senior professors influencing junior professors, or the hot-shots influencing the rest.

Even when we get a collaboration going, we don’t tend to have assigned roles. People do what they can, when they can, and if you’re an expert on one part of the work you’ll probably end up doing that part, but that won’t be “the plan” because there almost never is a plan. There’s very rarely a “person in charge”: if there’s a disagreement it gets solved by one person convincing another that they’re right.

This kind of loose structure is freeing, but it can also be frustrating. Even the question of who is on a collaboration can be up in the air, with a sometimes tacit assumption that if you were there for certain conversations you’re there for the paper. It’s possible to push for more structure, but push too hard and people will start ignoring you anyway.

Would we benefit from more structure? That depends on the project. Sometimes, when we have clear goals, a more “corporate” approach can work. Other times, when we’re exploring something genuinely new, any plan is going to fail: we simply don’t know what we’re going to run into, what will matter and what won’t. Maybe there are corporate strategies for that kind of research, ways to manage that workflow. I don’t know them.

The Wolfram Physics Project Makes Me Queasy

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Stephen Wolfram is…Stephen Wolfram.

Once a wunderkind student of Feynman, Wolfram is now best known for his software, Mathematica, a tool used by everyone from scientists to lazy college students. Almost all of my work is coded in Mathematica, and while it has some flaws (can someone please speed up the linear solver? Maple’s is so much better!) it still tends to be the best tool for the job.

Wolfram is also known for being a very strange person. There’s his tendency to name, or rename, things after himself. (There’s a type of Mathematica file that used to be called “.m”. Now by default they’re “.wl”, “Wolfram Language” files.) There’s his live-streamed meetings. And then there’s his physics.

In 2002, Wolfram wrote a book, “A New Kind of Science”, arguing that computational systems called cellular automata were going to revolutionize science. A few days ago, he released an update: a sprawling website for “The Wolfram Physics Project”. In it, he claims to have found a potential “theory of everything”, unifying general relativity and quantum physics in a cellular automata-like form.

If that gets your crackpot klaxons blaring, yeah, me too. But Wolfram was once a very promising physicist. And he has collaborators this time, who are currently promising physicists. So I should probably give him a fair reading.

On the other hand, his introduction for a technical audience is 448 pages long. I may have more time now due to COVID-19, but I still have a job, and it isn’t reading that.

So I compromised. I didn’t read his 448-page technical introduction. I read his 90-ish page blog post. The post is written for a non-technical audience, so I know it isn’t 100% accurate. But by seeing how someone chooses to promote their work, I can at least get an idea of what they value.

I started out optimistic, or at least trying to be. Wolfram starts with simple mathematical rules, and sees what kinds of structures they create. That’s not an unheard of strategy in theoretical physics, including in my own field. And the specific structures he’s looking at look weirdly familiar, a bit like a generalization of cluster algebras.

Reading along, though, I got more and more uneasy. That unease peaked when I saw him describe how his structures give rise to mass.

Wolfram had already argued that his structures obey special relativity. (For a critique of this claim, see this twitter thread.) He found a way to define energy and momentum in his system, as “fluxes of causal edges”. He picks out a particular “flux of causal edges”, one that corresponds to “just going forward in time”, and defines it as mass. Then he “derives” E=mc^2, saying,

Sometimes in the standard formalism of physics, this relation by now seems more like a definition than something to derive. But in our model, it’s not just a definition, and in fact we can successfully derive it.

In “the standard formalism of physics”, E=mc^2 means “mass is the energy of an object at rest”. It means “mass is the energy of an object just going forward in time”. If the “standard formalism of physics” “just defines” E=mc^2, so does Wolfram.

I haven’t read his technical summary. Maybe this isn’t really how his “derivation” works, maybe it’s just how he decided to summarize it. But it’s a pretty misleading summary, one that gives the reader entirely the wrong idea about some rather basic physics. It worries me, because both as a physicist and a blogger, he really should know better. I’m left wondering whether he meant to mislead, or whether instead he’s misleading himself.

That feeling kept recurring as I kept reading. There was nothing else as extreme as that passage, but a lot of pieces that felt like they were making a big deal about the wrong things, and ignoring what a physicist would find the most important questions.

I was tempted to get snarkier in this post, to throw in a reference to Lewis’s trilemma or some variant of the old quip that “what is new is not good; and what is good is not new”. For now, I’ll just say that I probably shouldn’t have read a 90 page pop physics treatise before lunch, and end the post with that.

Thoughts on Doing Science Remotely

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In these times, I’m unusually lucky.

I’m a theoretical physicist. I don’t handle goods, or see customers. Other scientists need labs, or telescopes: I just need a computer and a pad of paper. As a postdoc, I don’t even teach. In the past, commenters have asked me why I don’t just work remotely. Why go to conferences, why even go to the office?

With COVID-19, we’re finding out.

First, the good: my colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute have been hard at work keeping everyone connected. Our seminars have moved online, where we hold weekly Zoom seminars jointly with Iceland, Uppsala and Nordita. We have a “virtual coffee room”, a Zoom room that’s continuously open with “virtual coffee breaks” at 10 and 3:30 to encourage people to show up. We’re planning virtual colloquia, and even a virtual social night with Jackbox games.

Is it working? Partially.

The seminars are the strongest part. Remote seminars let us bring in speakers from all over the world (time zones permitting). They let one seminar serve the needs of several different institutes. Most of the basic things a seminar needs (slides, blackboards, ability to ask questions, ability to clap) are present on online platforms, particularly Zoom. And our seminar organizers had the bright idea to keep the Zoom room open after the talk, which allows the traditional “after seminar conversation with the speaker” for those who want it.

Still, the setup isn’t as good as it could be. If the audience turns off their cameras and mics, the speaker can feel like they’re giving a talk to an empty room. This isn’t just awkward, it makes the talk worse: speakers improve when they can “feel the room” and see what catches their audience’s interest. If the audience keeps their cameras or mics on instead, it takes a lot of bandwidth, and the speaker still can’t really feel the room. I don’t know if there’s a good solution here, but it’s worth working on.

The “virtual coffee room” is weaker. It was quite popular at first, but as time went on fewer and fewer people (myself included) showed up. In contrast, my wife’s friends at Waterloo do a daily cryptic crossword, and that seems to do quite well. What’s the difference? They have real crosswords, we don’t have real coffee.

I kid, but only a little. Coffee rooms and tea breaks work because of a core activity, a physical requirement that brings people together. We value them for their social role, but that role on its own isn’t enough to get us in the door. We need the excuse: the coffee, the tea, the cookies, the crossword. Without that shared structure, people just don’t show up.

Getting this kind of thing right is more important than it might seem. Social activities help us feel better, they help us feel less isolated. But more than that, they help us do science better.

That’s because science works, at least in part, through serendipity.

You might think of scientific collaboration as something we plan, and it can be sometimes. Sometimes we know exactly what we’re looking for: a precise calculation someone else can do, a question someone else can answer. Sometimes, though, we’re helped by chance. We have random conversations, different people in different situations, coffee breaks and conference dinners, and eventually someone brings up an idea we wouldn’t have thought of on our own.

Other times, chance helps by providing an excuse. I have a few questions rattling around in my head that I’d like to ask some of my field’s big-shots, but that don’t feel worth an email. I’ve been waiting to meet them at a conference instead. The advantage of those casual meetings is that they give an excuse for conversation: we have to talk about something, it might as well be my dumb question. Without that kind of causal contact, it feels a lot harder to broach low-stakes topics.

None of this is impossible to do remotely. But I think we need new technology (social or digital) to make it work well. Serendipity is easy to find in person, but social networks can imitate it. Log in to facebook or tumblr looking for your favorite content, and you face a pile of ongoing conversations. Looking through them, you naturally “run into” whatever your friends are talking about. I could see something similar for academia. Take something like the list of new papers on arXiv, then run a list of ongoing conversations next to it. When we check the arXiv each morning, we could see what our colleagues were talking about, and join in if we see something interesting. It would be a way to stay connected that would keep us together more, giving more incentive and structure beyond simple loneliness, and lead to the kind of accidental meetings that science craves. You could even graft conferences on to that system, talks in the middle with conversation threads on the side.

None of us know how long the pandemic will last, or how long we’ll be asked to work from home. But even afterwards, it’s worth thinking about the kind of infrastructure science needs to work remotely. Some ideas may still be valuable after all this is over.

Socratic Grilling, Crackpots, and Trolls

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The blog Slate Star Codex had an interesting post last month, titled Socratic Grilling. The post started with a dialogue, a student arguing with a teacher about germ theory.

Student: Hey, wait. If germs are spread from person to person on touch, why doesn’t the government just mandate one week when nobody is allowed to touch anyone else? Then all the germs will die and we’ll never have to worry about germs again.

Out of context, the student looks like a crackpot. But in context, the student is just trying to learn, practicing a more aggressive version of Socratic questioning which the post dubbed “Socratic grilling”.

The post argued that Socratic grilling is normal and unavoidable, and that experts treat it with far more hostility than they should. Experts often reject this kind of questioning as arrogant, unless the non-expert doing the grilling is hilariously deferential. (The post’s example: “I know I am but a mere student, and nowhere near smart enough to actually challenge you, so I’m sure I’m just misunderstanding this, but the thing you just said seems really confusing to me, and I’m not saying it’s not true, but I can’t figure out how it possibly could be true, which is my fault and not yours, but could you please try to explain it differently?”)

The post made me think a bit about my own relationship with crackpots. I’d like to say that when a non-expert challenges me I listen to them regardless of their tone, that you don’t need to be so deferential around me. In practice, though…well, it certainly helps.

What I want (or at least what I want to want) is not humility, but intellectual humility. You shouldn’t have to talk about how inexperienced you are to get me to listen to you. But you should make clear what you know, how you know it, and what the limits of that evidence are. If I’m right, it helps me understand what you’re misunderstanding. If you’re right, it helps me get why your argument works.

I’ve referred to both non-experts and crackpots in this post. To be clear, I think of one as a subgroup of the other. When I refer to crackpots, I’m thinking of a specific sort of non-expert: one with a very detailed idea they have invested a lot of time and passion into, which the mainstream considers impossible. If you’re just skeptical of general relativity or quantum mechanics, you’re not a crackpot. But if you’ve come up with your own replacement to general relativity or quantum mechanics, you probably are. Note also that, no matter how dumb their ideas, I don’t think of experts in a topic as crackpots on that topic. Garrett Lisi is silly, and probably wrong, but he’s not a crackpot.

A result of this is that crackpots (as I define them) rarely do actual Socratic grilling. For a non-expert who hasn’t developed their own theory, Socratic grilling can be a good way to figure out what the heck those experts are thinking. But for a crackpot, the work they have invested in their ideas means they’re often much less interested in what the experts have to say.

This isn’t always the case. I’ve had some perfectly nice conversations with crackpots. I remember an email exchange with a guy who had drawn what he thought were Feynman diagrams without really knowing what they were, and wanted me to calculate them. While I quit that conversation out of frustration, it was my fault, not his.

Sometimes, though, it’s clear from the tactics that someone isn’t trying to learn. There’s a guy who has tried to post variations of the same comment on this blog sixteen times. He picks a post that mentions math, and uses that as an excuse to bring up his formula for the Hubble constant (“you think you’re so good at math, then explain this!”). He says absolutely nothing about the actual post, and concludes by mentioning that his book is available on Kindle.

It’s pretty clear that spammers like that aren’t trying to learn. They aren’t doing Socratic grilling, they’re just trying (and failing) to get people to buy their book.

It’s less clear how to distinguish Socratic grilling from trolling. Sometimes, someone asks an aggressive series of questions because they think you’re wrong, and want to clarify why. Sometimes, though, someone asks an aggressive series of questions because they want to annoy you.

How can you tell if someone is just trolling? Inconsistency is one way. A Socratic grill-er will have a specific position in mind, even if you can’t quite tell what it is. A troll will say whatever they need to to keep arguing. If it becomes clear that there isn’t any consistent picture behind what the other person is saying, they’re probably just a troll.

In the end, no-one is a perfect teacher. If you aren’t making headway explaining something, if an argument just keeps going in circles, then you probably shouldn’t continue. You may be dealing with a troll, or it might just be honest Socratic grilling, but either way it doesn’t matter: if you’re stuck, you’re stuck, and it’s more productive to back off than to get in a screaming match.

That’s been my philosophy anyway. I engage with Socratic grilling as long as it’s productive, whether or not you’re a crackpot. But if you spam, I’ll block your comments, while if I think you’re trolling or not listening I’ll just stop responding. It’s not worth my time at that point, and it’s not worth yours either.