- Clifford at Asymptotia writes about his kettle buying experience, and uses that as the starting point to give some pointers on how to think about physics problems:
Physics training is all about figuring out which parts of those messy systems are important to the question you’re asking, and which parts are just “noise”.
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Physics training is also about knowing which question to ask in the first place.
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Once you’ve found your question, and separated out the noise from the signal (usually by identifying a reliable approximation scheme), then you’re ready to bring out the mathematical tools and solve the problem using brute force and whatever tricks you’ve learned over years of experience.
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The last step in the sequence is to step back from the Mathematics and plug everything back into the Physics problem and answer the original question.
Undoubtedly, a must-read piece.
- Rob Knopp at Galactic interactions has an alternate model to fund astronomy research:
Why not the following. Every institution that has an astronomy program will be designated a certain fractaion of the pie.
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The division of the money amongst the invididual astronomers would then be the institution’s problem to work out.
However, I am not sure what makes him think that the individual institution can come up with a mechanism that allows fair sharing of the funding, and supports good research. For example, what happens if some Institution decides to give major fraction of the funds to some established researcher? The institution might still be able to justify the funding that it receives; but, it will drastically reduce the variety of research, and eventually lead to specialised units headed by individuals (or groups of individuals). In fact, such funding, in the long run, may even lead to Institutions collecting people of some specific expertise at the cost of variety.
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Entertaining Research 
July 2, 2007 at 5:01 pm |
Institutions in astronomy already do, sometimes, try to specialize. I’m not sure it’s such a problem.
The truth is, though, that most of the time we’re talking small numbers of people. There are a few departments out there with more than 20 astronomers, but they are the exception. There are a lot with a handful. I know at my institution that if we had “our share” of the funding, we’d be able to work together and use it reasonably. I suspect that most are the same way. Where there is lots of nasty infighting such as can be found at Caltech, some more formal strictures would need to be set in place. But I would point out that the faculty at Caltech are able to equitably share their guaranteed access to the Keck and Palomar telescopes– so there even exists an example of a contentions place doing the right thing with resources.
If junior faculty are always on the short end of the stick, that is the sort of thing that I would hope would show up as a negative in the regular reviews I talk about.
July 2, 2007 at 8:18 pm |
Dear Rob Knop,
Thanks for stopping by and your clarifications. I was not aware of the specializations that already exist in astronomy departments; I was talking from my experience with materials science and engineering departments, where, a lack of variety might actually kill the department.
I do think that some formal strictures should be introduced with the type of funding that you advocate to make sure that there is no infighting and unequitable sharing, since, even those places which are reasonable under the present funding schemes might not continue to be so with the new schemes in place. With such formal strictures in place, however, your mechanism might be very effective.
Personally, I do know that a slightly varied version of your mechanism do exist in India. The funding agencies identify centres of excellence for various areas of research, and allocate good chunks funds, which is then shared by the members of the Deaprtment via some internal mechanism.