Straining gnats and swallowing camels on campus

The world is being run by accountants, lawyers, and marketing consultants. They work for corporations, universities, trade unions, and government. Some are "rent seekers" and parasites who project themselves as standing for justice and fairness.

We also live in a world where people are not allowed to make even small mistakes.

These painful realities were highlighted to me this week in an email some colleagues received from the President of their university.

"I am writing to advise staff about the outcome of a pay review initiated in October 2021 and the actions taken as part of this to further strengthen our pay systems and processes. 

The University commenced this external review to ensure our staff are paid accurately and in accordance with our Enterprise Agreement (EA) applicable at the time.

The review took 18 months. How much staff time and money was spent to engage these external consultants on this review? 

While staff were paid for the time they worked, the review identified 2 areas of our EA were not always correctly applied. These relate to the minimum hours of engagement for casual academic and casual professional staff and the use of a different pay rate for casual academic staff with a relevant PhD.

As a result, the University has determined that over a 7-year period (January 2017 to December 2023), an amount of $7.88 million (excluding superannuation and interest) should have been paid to 9743 staff. The median amount to be paid is $243.03.

Note. This corresponds to staff being underpaid by less than one dollar per week! 

I unreservedly apologise to those staff who have been affected by these errors – they should not have happened. I want to assure our community that affected staff will receive all the pay due, including superannuation and interest for the relevant period.

This week, we are writing individually to affected current staff outlining the payment due, with these payments to commence from 14 June.

We will also be writing individually to affected former staff outlining the payment due and the process for remediation.

A comprehensive program is underway to upgrade our systems and processes to further ensure ongoing pay accuracy. Actions being taken include the introduction of a whole-of-Univ timesheet system, compulsory training for managers and staff and additional fortnightly payroll reporting.

Does this mean faculty will now fill out time sheets? 

We are also investing further in our HR systems, with new time and attendance and payroll systems planned.

Sounds like a whole new layer of bureaucracy. 

Throughout this process we have worked closely with the Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman and have advised them of these outcomes.

Again, I apologise that this has occurred and reaffirm our commitment to ensuring staff are appropriately and accurately paid for the work they do on behalf of the University."

Meanwhile I don't hear of any external reviews or apologies for the treatment by university management of people such as Gerd Shroder-Turk, Drew Pavlou, Paul Frijters, or James Allan, ...

Two thousand years ago the following was written.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 

You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence."

More superconductivity in Hollywood

I wrote a post about superconductivity being central to the plot of the cult-classic movie, Joe Versus the Volcano. A commenter on the post kindly pointed out that the movie Avatar also features superconductivity. It is nicely captured in this scene.

The Wikipedia entry for Unobtanium is interesting as it describes the long history of the term, predating the movie by decades. I had not heard the term before. It does capture much of the hype and fantasy about research in "advanced materials".

About Avatar the entry states

In the 2009 film Avatar,^[23] "Unobtanium" is the common name of a rare-earth mineral found exclusively in the exomoon Pandora (where the movie takes place, being the fifth moon of the gas giant Polyphemus, which orbits Alpha Centauri A), highly prized (and priced) because of its application as a powerful superconductor material; because of its unusual magnetic properties, entire mountains with high concentrations of unobtanium "levitate" in the atmosphere of Pandora.

The whole is qualitatively different from the parts: beer, birds, and brains

Pint of Science is an annual event in cities all around Australia. Local scientists give short talks about their research to general audiences. I am speaking tonight, along with my colleague Ben Powell. 

I found the tips to speakers very helpful. This led me to try and make the talk more of a personal story, reduce the amount of text on slides, and aim for engagement rather than focusing on scientific details or on technical details of your own research.

Here is the current version of my slides.

The introduction is based on this video and poem about emergence in economics.

This provides an example of how "free" economic markets can work well sometimes. But I will also point out that they can also fail spectacularly, another emergent phenomenon! 

The relevance of Labor Day to physicists and philosophers

This past Monday, May 8, was a public holiday in Queensland, marking Labor Day. I don't know why we don't celebrate it on May 1, but that does not matter.

In honour of the event, I post two relevant resources. The first resource is a moving video by Sabine Hossenfelder, who has carved out a post-academic income as a populariser of physics. The video is funny and sad, describing her own experience in academia leading to "Death of a Dream".

Sabine has many poignant observations about the dysfunctionalities of physics in academia, from the personal to the intellectual.

I find it sad that people who leave academia because they could not find a permanent job see themselves as a "failure." First,  most of the select few who get permanent jobs do so because they are at the right place at the right time, not because they are so much more brilliant and productive than others. Second, there is so much more to life than professional success. Finally, Sabine has been an incredible success. She has been able to popularise physics far beyond what has been achieved by others with big names and lots of resources. Furthermore, Sabine has made a significant contribution to the physics community by calling out hype and BS.

The second resource to mark Labor Day is an article, 

In Australian Universities, There Is No Such Thing as a Secure Job, by Danny Wardle. 

It puts a specific (alarming) incident in the broader context of the history of how and why the governance and management of Australian universities have been captured by the ideology of neoliberalism. This has been facilitated by the opportunism and vanity of mediocre academics who become "managers" with million-dollar salaries.

Emergence of the arrow of time

Time has a direction. Microscopic equations of motion in classical and quantum mechanics have time-reversible symmetry. But this symmetry is broken for many macroscopic phenomena. This observation is encoded in the second law of thermodynamics. We experience the flow of time and distinguish past, present, and future. The arrow of time is manifest in phenomena that occur at scales covering many orders of magnitude. Here are some of these different arrows of time, listed in order of increasing time scales. These are discussed by Tony Leggett in chapter 5 of The Problems of Physics.

Elementary particle physics. CP violation is observed in certain phenomena associated with the weak nuclear interaction, such as the decay of neutral kaons observed in 1964. The CPT symmetry theorem shows that any local quantum field theory that is invariant under the “proper” Lorentz transformations must also be invariant under combined CPT transformations. This means that CP violation means that time-reversal symmetry is broken. In 1989, the direction violation of T symmetry was observed.

Electromagnetism. When an electric charge is accelerated an electromagnetic wave propagates out from the charge towards infinity. Energy is transferred from the charge to its environment. We do not observe a wave that propagates from infinity into the accelerating charge, i.e., energy being transferred from the environment to the charge. Yet this possibility is allowed by the equations of motion for electromagnetism. There is an absence of the “advanced” solution to the equations of motion. 

Thermodynamics. Irreversibility happens in isolated systems. Heat never travels from a cold body to a hotter one. Fluids spontaneously mix. There is a time ordering of the thermodynamic states of isolated macroscopic systems. The thermodynamic entropy encodes this ordering.

Psychological experience. We remember the past and think we can affect the future. We don’t think we can affect the past or know the future.

Biological evolution. Over time species adapt to their environment and become more complex and more diverse.

Cosmology. There was a beginning to the universe. The universe is expanding not contracting. Density perturbations grow independent of cosmic time (Hawking and Laflamme).

It is debatable to what extent these arrows of time are related to one another. 

The problem of how statistical mechanics connects time-reversible microscopic dynamics with macroscopic irreversibility is subtle and contentious. Joel Lebowitz claimed this problem was solved by Boltzmann, provided the distinction between typical and average behaviour are accepted, along with the Past Hypothesis. This states that the universe was initially in a state of extremely low entropy. David Wallace discussed the need to accept the idea of probabilities in law of physics and that the competing interpretations of probability as frequency or ignorance matter. In contrast, David Deutsch claims that the second law of thermodynamics is an “emergent law”: it cannot be derived from microscopic laws, like the principle of testability.

I find the Past Hypothesis fascinating because it connects the arrow of time seen in the laboratory and everyday life (time scales of microseconds to years) to cosmology, covering timescales of the lifetime of the universe (10^10 years) and the “initial” state of the universe, perhaps at the end of the inflationary epoch (10^-33 seconds). This also raises questions about how to formulate the Second Law and the concept of entropy in the presence of gravity and on cosmological length and time scales. 

Effective theories in classical and quantum mechanics

Working in quantum many-body theory, I slowly learned that many key concepts and techniques have predecessors and analogues in classical systems and one-body quantum systems. Examples include Green's functions, path integrals, cumulants, the linked cluster theorem, Hubbard-Stratonavich transformation (completing the square), mean-field theory, localisation due to disorder, and BBGKY hierarchy. Learning a full-blown quantum many-body version is easier if you first understand simpler analogues.

This post is about effective theories in classical systems and one-body quantum systems, following my earlier post about effective theories in quantum field theories of elementary particles.

Michèle Levi has a pedagogical article

Effective field theories of post-Newtonian gravity: a comprehensive review

This is motivated by the use of EFTs to describe gravitational waves produced by the inspiraling and merging of binary black holes and neutron stars. She discusses the different scales involved and how there are effective theories at each scale. She also puts these EFTs in the broader context of other fields.

Analogues in one-body quantum mechanics are also discussed  in

Effective Field Theories, Reductionism and Scientific Explanation, by Stephan Hartmann

"In his beautiful book Qualitative Methods in Quantum Theory, Migdal (1977) discusses an instructive example from quantum mechanics. Let S be a system which is composed of a fast subsystem Sf and a slow subsystem Ss, characterised by two frequencies of and os. It can be shown that the effects of Sf on Ss can be taken into account effectively by adding a potential energy term to the Hamiltonian operator of Ss. In this case, as well as in many other cases, one ends up with an effective Hamiltonian operator for the subsystem characterised by the smaller frequency (or energy)."

An important example of this is the Born-Oppenheimer approximation which is based on the separation of time and energy scales associated with electronic and nuclear motion. It is used to describe and understand the dynamics of nuclei and electronic transitions in solids and molecules. The potential energy surfaces for different electronic states define an effective theory for the nuclei. Without this concept, much of theoretical chemistry and condensed matter would be incredibly difficult.

Physics on Netflix

The Netflix series, 3-body Problem, features physics and physicists throughout. I am not a big fan of science fiction, but watched the first episode, to try and get a sense of why the series is attracting so much attention. The opening scene (in the video above) is rooted in history. It depicts a "struggle session" during the Cultural Revolution, featuring the denunciation and killing of a physics professor, who is the father of the main character in the series.

For some more on the intellectual and political background see

Organized criticism of Einstein and relativity in China, 1949–1989, by Danian Hu