There are two aspects to this question concerning the future of condensed matter physics. First, are there big things to be discovered? If yes, will they be discovered?
I believe the first answer is yes for two reasons. First, the past hundred years have given us a continual stream of discoveries, many of them unexpected. Every time that things get a little boring, pretty soon there is something exciting and new. Second, condensed matter physics is all about emergent phenomena in materials. Emergent phenomena are extremely hard to anticipate or predict. Because of the combinatorics of chemistry, the list of possible materials to study is endless. CMP presents an endless frontier to explore. However, just because such a frontier exists does not mean that it will be explored. Successful explorers require courage, creativity, resources, time, and freedom.
I am concerned that the wild frontiers of condensed matter may not be explored. It is worth reflecting on who were some of the pioneers of CMP and the character of their institutional environments. Consider Kammerlingh Onnes, Landau, Kapitsa, Anderson, de Gennes, and Leggett. Some common elements of the context (institutional, historical, political) in which they made their discoveries were time, stability, job security, mental space, and intellectual freedom. For example, Anderson spent almost three decades at Bell Labs in its heyday. Thanks to the monopoly of Bell in providing telephone services in the USA, the parent company had a very secure and stable income, providing it the ability to provide substantial financial and institutional support for basic research.
These pioneers played a long game. They had the freedom to fail, to choose research topics, and to change directions. They did not follow fashion and were fiercely independent thinkers. Andrew Zangwill highlights this about Anderson in his biography. They largely had the resources they needed and did not have to worry or fight for funding. Their daily life was very different from that of a researcher today. Their mental space was not filled with an endless stream of distractions such as emails, grant proposals, conferences, reporting, reviewing, committees, metrics, ... Most of their time and mental energy was simply focused on curiosity-driven research.
Today, there is intense competition for funding, institutional status, and career benefits associated with obtaining it, and a pressure to produce in the short term "outputs" (papers) and "impact" (citations) and "national benefit" (technological, commercial, security, and social). This naturally leads to researchers working on "safe" projects in fashionable areas that they are confident will produce results in the short term.
I hope that I am wrong. But, I fear that great discoveries may be missed.
I completely share your concerns. This not only affects condensed matter physics but science in general.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree - it's one of the reasons why I decided not to purse an academic career in physics (I'm currently a postdoc). I'm wondering, to what extent do you think places like IBM, Google, and Microsoft are able to approximate the situation at Bell Labs? Certainly they are more commercially-driven (lacking a legal monopoly), but I would imagine that at least some of the distractions faced by professors are not present. Then there is also the Flatiron Institute, funded by the Simons Foundation. I suppose they would need even less of a focus on immediate commercial applications.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03172-5
ReplyDeleteAccording to some economists and business scholars, open innovation characterizes a ‘Third Industrial Revolution’19. From their perspective, the university professor seeking to patent the results of federally funded research to form a start-up, with seed money from venture capitalists, is the direct descendant of the consulting chemist of the nineteenth century. In this ecosystem, a population of nimble researchers and small firms has displaced a pack of lumbering corporate labs20. To critics and less-sanguine academics, the twenty-first-century relations of science and industry illustrate the commodification of university research and the corruption of the pursuit of knowledge by the profit motive21.
From the above article by in Nature
ReplyDeleteCan marketplace science be trusted?
Historian Paul Lucier traces the explosion and fragmentation of industrial research in the fifth essay in a series on how the past 150 years have shaped today’s science system, marking Nature’s anniversary.
"These leading corporate laboratories — Bell Labs, IBM, Westinghouse, DuPont, RCA (Princeton), Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, 1970) — became powerhouses of basic science. Between 1956 and 1987, 12 corporate scientists won Nobel prizes. Bell Labs alone has collected eight in physics and one in chemistry since the Second World War, including one for its most famous technology, the transistor, in 1956. In the early 1960s, corporate researchers authored 70% of papers appearing in Physics Abstracts. By 1980, Xerox PARC matched the world’s leading universities on citation impact"
and now
Today, a complex innovation web has replaced the old conveyor belt. This is another new model — global commercialization. Supply-chain science is premised on the belief that research is a fungible commodity to be bought on demand and sold by the lowest-cost lab. In some ways, twenty-first-century contract research is reminiscent of nineteenth-century consulting science. In both cases, the question remains: is marketplace science trustworthy?
Arguably computer science has still maintained the modern Bell Labs equivalent of independent, free science at research centers like Microsoft Research (functionally distinct from Microsoft as a company).
ReplyDeleteFor hard sciences, I am afraid everyone is chasing a phantom. Bell Labs and similar places grew out of very special economic conditions after WW2 in the USA, and we can only envy those privileged to experience it. Replication simply is not possible anymore.
I have yet to meet anyone who can explain in concrete detail how to create similar institutions to Bell labs for hard science in modern times. I personally believe this golden age of condensed matter physics is long over and cannot return. However, that does not mean outstanding science in CM is no longer done, it just means one must accept that post-WW2 explosion of research in CM was the exception, not the rule.
Even China, which is the new oncoming global superpower of the 21st century has been so far unable to replicate the special place that was Bell labs in the 50s-70s. I doubt they will ever bother trying, because they are unfortunately even more fiercely focused on silly bibliometrics than the West.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the future of condensed matter physics. I completely agree with your statements. The only thing that I would like to add is that it becomes increasingly less
ReplyDeleteattractive for young people to pursue an academic career due to the issues you mentioned in your blog post. Competition is high, permanent positions are scarce, distractions and administrative tasks become more, salaries are too low in comparison with industry (especially in Europe), and research is driven too much by so-called "hot topics", which sadly leads to the fact that too many scientists focus on research projects that are most promising for the acquisition of external funding. These issues make academia less attractive, and unfortunately some of the best and smartest researchers I have worked with are now working in industry. By contrast, people who can simply sell their research in a convincing way are often the most successful in academia. Even worse are things like h-index or impact factors, which are the death knell for excellent scientists who focus on more specialized, risky or nonmainstream research, where breakthroughs might not be easily anticipated. I don't want to be too pessimistic about the future of academia, but these issues worry me - both as a young scientist and as a human being in general.