Terry Blanton <[email protected]> wrote: > > I would think that young physicists would want to seize the day > and venture into this Undiscovered Country where they stand to make a > name for themselves. >
They might want to, but if they talk about doing this they would soon be tossed out the university on some pretext. For any graduate student, anywhere in the U.S., it is career suicide to talk about cold fusion, or to suggest doing an experiment. I have heard that from many professors and grad students. Academic politics is a rough game. The play it for keeps. You fail to toe the line -- you question the system -- they kick your butt out. All this talk you hear about academic freedom, and the tradition of questioning authority is bullshit. It is bullshit now, and it always has been. There is more freedom to question authority in professions such as programming than there ever was in mainstream physics. Read any biography of any physicist in the last hundred years and you will find quotes like the Townes biography: One day after we had been at it for about two years, Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairmen of the department -- both of them Nobel laureates for work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot of weight behind their opinions -- came into my office and sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source as did mine. "Look," they said, "you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work. We know it's not going to work. You're wasting money. Just stop!" The problem was that I was still an outsider to the field of molecular beams, as they saw it. . . . I simply told them that I thought it had a reasonable chance and that I would continue. I was then indeed thankful that I had come to Columbia with tenure. (p. 65) Read the book "Hubble Wars" and you will see how corrupt mainstream science is. The problem is that there is no accountability. People publish fake data and lies, and no one questions them or even cares. Most academic research is inconsequential. Peter Hagelstein and I once took a 10-hour flight. He told me story after story about corruption in academia. It is much worse than people realize. I am a cynical person. I have seen a lot of corruption in the computer business, on Wall Street and elsewhere. I have seldom met such a crowd of conniving lowlifes as your average academic professors. You can be darn sure that if Rabi and Kusch could have stopped Townes, they would have. Even if it meant firing him. Scientists do this sort of thing all the time. It isn't just unethical; in any other line of work what they do would be illegal. If they were businessmen instead of academics, what they do routinely, with things like peer-review, would violate antitrust laws, fair trade laws, and so many other laws they would lose their licenses to practice, and they would be fined and jailed. - Jed
