It's been a couple of months since I posted here, partly because of holiday,
partly work, and partly because what spare time I've had has been spent
voraciously following the economic and political conversations that the
suprisingly interesting Labour leadership election campaign has raised.
I suspect I'll spew my thoughts on the latter topic, and the general state we're
in, at a not-much-later date. But today an easier task: a few thoughts on a
residential "creativity" course that I did over the last couple of days.
All in all it wasn't bad. My thought on this sort of thing is that although many
things that the University promote to us sound like the worst kind of management
guff, there is often a kernel of useful content. Getting it might require a
trade-off, i.e. sitting through 8 hours of infuriating nonsense to get the
benefit of 5 mins of mild insight, but taking the occasional risk is, I think,
preferable to decrying well-meaning "personal development" forever, and maybe
missing out on something useful. As it happens, I had attended an "Effective
Communication" course just a month ago, which was well worth the morning that I
spent on it. Sometimes I even surprise my cynical self.
Two days residential course is a lot more than a morning, of course, but it was
an easy call to make when I realised that this course would count as a more
enjoyable version of the mandatory "Entrepreneurship" course that I need to
attend. The first day had its good moments, but suffered -- or rather I
suffered -- from endless hours of repeating the truism that creativity is in
practice always about inventive, revealing combinations of existing things,
rather than somehow popping 100% new ideas, based on not an iota of pre-existing
knowledge, out of the vacuum. It's a reasonable point, and helpful for some, but
is like an unconstructive mathematical proof: sure, that's true, but it has
nothing to say about either what combinations are interesting, nor how to bias
ourselves toward finding them. Day 2 was a bit better, with a nice exercise on a
"toy model" topic... apparently we need to pay the training consultant more to
get the "proper" course that works on real situations. Oh well. There's more to
come, and I don't regret the two days of attempted self-improvement.
One of the things that struck me, among all the "unlearning" and challenging of
preconceptions, was that every time my colleagues (in the broad sense -- I was
the only physicist in the room) were given the opportunity to ask a free-form
question, it was about grant applications, reviews, publications, and all the
other paraphenalia of academic life. This isn't really surprising on the face
of it, but the form of the questions caught me by surprise: there was rarely a
sense of perspective, or awareness that there is value in many of the things
that we do regardless of whether they lead to grants or publications. It was
implicit that the only thing that matters is those superficial aspects of
academic -- the cargo cult stuff -- that performance reviews and promotion
metrics focus on. There was even a repeated question along the lines of
"Shouldn't I just leave creativity for later, since I think grant reviewers want
to see safe proposals at this stage". Very sad.
The question I ended up asking is "Why am I not equally myopic?" or more
self-critically, "What do they know that I don't?". One part of the answer
really is personal. My career hasn't had a very standard trajectory for a HEP
experimentalist -- post-PhD I took 4 years "out" of experiment to work among
theorists, in an environment where I was essentially my own boss for 90% of the
time, and had great support from the likes of Jon Butterworth. This gave me a
lot of freedom to establish a value system that was all about the science
quality rather than the cargo-cult trappings of academia -- which of course I am
framing to you as being the One True Way. And my natural inclination is anyway
that rocking boats are more interesting than the plain sailing type. But while
there are certainly plenty of experimental HEP'ers whose primary focus is
strategic moves for rapid career progression -- conventionally followed by
endless moaning about the unfairness of all the teaching and admin that they
couldn't wait to inflict upon themselves
-- I think on the whole our peculiar type of science protects us from the worst
effects of modern academia's performance metrics on at least two fronts.
First up is the meaninglessness of citation counts in experimental HEP. In this
strange world where one need only qualify as an ATLAS author once, and never
again be asked to do any service (or indeed any) work to justify the constant
flow of papers with your name on it, publication measures like raw citation
counts, paper counts, or h-indices mean virtually nothing. Their strongest
correlation is with longevity in the field, and in particular longevity on major
running experiments. While this gives some advantage to those who spent the
2000s on running Tevatron experiments rather than in-development LHC ones, I
think the main effect is a sort of scroll-blindness: everyone's numbers are so
large and so similar that there is no power of differentiation. And when it
comes to exercises like the REF, pretty much every UK HEP group points at the
same major papers and has a half-decent case for doing so. Having filled our CVs
up to the brim with collective publications, there is actually remarkable
freedom on the resulting Fermi surface for us to focus on what we find
interesting, without needing to daily obsess about The Paper. I'm also
thoroughly looking forward to the demise of that outdated, cargo-cultish mode of
academic communication -- and wealth transfer to Elsevier
-- but that's for another day.
The second point in our favour is STFC's group consolidated grants, which are
necessary for functional operation of very large projects over decades, as
opposed to the 1 or 2 year peripatetic funding that is the norm elsewhere. Again
there is individual freedom to be found in collectivism (christ, this is going
to start reading like Maoist propaganda any minute now) -- most of us need not
be overly concerned with grant chasing, particularly as there really aren't that
many of them to chase. One poor biochemist I talked to said he'd put in 25 grant
applications in the last 2 years -- I'm pretty sure there aren't even close to
that many funding calls in total in UK/EU particle physics over that
timescale. I can imagine that if your life becomes that dominated by application
writing, then just like the people in the Bill Hicks skit you start to forget
that it's just a ride. You forget
that the reason you do this is not really the funding, or the promotion, or any
of that crap, but the satisfaction of a job well done and of increasing our
collective knowledge and wisdom.
Particle physics isn't a panacea, of course -- there is still deep unfairness
over the number of excellent postdocs that we train, overwork, and then fail to
provide permanent places for. And our huge collaborations have brought new modes
of careerist gaming, and perverse incentives to do bad or at least substandard
science. Grants are still chased, albeit with more emphasis on personal
fellowships than project funding; and to my colleagues I'm sure I sound like a
broken record when criticising their daily attendance of interminable ATLAS
videoconference meetings* -- the motivation for which is something like "Jesus
is coming; look busy" in the belief that being sub-co-coordinator of the Paper
Clips Working Group is going to have some positive career impact. But despite
all that, I think we've been strangely blessed by the administrative
implications of our supersized science: a sort of academic asymptotic
freedom. Long may it last.
[*] I'll maybe also moan about the appaling quality of ATLAS meetings at a later
date. I'm just going to say here and now that I stopped attending them about 2
years ago, unless I specifically have a horse in that race. I've yet to notice
any adverse impact, and I have a lot more headspace for physics thinking. Try it.