What Does Any of This Have to Do with Physics?

Re:What Does Any of This Have to Do with Physics? by NumberSix on Thursday December 29, 2016 @03:11PM (#13279732)

I truly don't think Einstein's work at the patent office was "low hanging fruit." -- quite the opposite. Most major scientific breakthroughs have required at least five years of work, usually frustrating trial and error, failures, blind alleys etc. A post-doc with a two year appointment, which is typical, simply does not have the time. He or she needs to publish something "impressive" in that two years. Einstein was in the enviable position of not having to worry about his next post-doc or whatever from 1903 onwards. In addition his patent work involved electrical and electromagnetic inventions that dovetailed well with his interests and background.

Modern physics has very few long term secure jobs to think about actual physics. Tenured faculty spend most of their time writing grant applications and fund raising -- not the same thing.

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Re:What Does Any of This Have to Do with Physics? by mathperson on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:48AM (#13282975)

this depends on the faculty...a theorist with little experimental costs would spend less time applying for grants.

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Re:What Does Any of This Have to Do with Physics? by NumberSix on Friday December 30, 2016 @04:21AM (#13283431)

Perhaps. Theory costs less but there is a lot less money available for theory. For example, in 2014, the total High Energy Physics (HEP) budget of the US Department of Energy (DOE) was about 750 million dollars, nearly all of it experimental, with only about 6-7 percent (63 million dollars) for theory.

http://science.energy.gov/~/media/hep/hepap/pdf/201403/Rolli...

The DOE HEP Theory budget has supposedly been dropping since 2014 -- actually 2012:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8998

I suspect the amount of time spent on writing grants and informal fund raising is related to the level of competition, how many theorists are pursuing how little money rather than the absolute amount of money available.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has many billions, but the probability of getting a grant is very low due to the huge overproduction of biology Ph.D.'s consequently researchers and would be researchers spend enormous amounts of time writing grant proposals, most of which are turned down.

https://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2015/06/29/what-are-the-chances...

The success/award rates in the above article (about 18 percent) actually seem high. I have seen numbers as low as 9 percent in some articles.

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