You know, we could easily write papers that are far more accessible to a lay audience. We don’t normally speak the way we write academic papers, and that sort of language is not required to accurately convey a precise meaning.
…But then our papers would never get published.
The very existence of an “intellectual community” is the reason that most scientists don’t accomplish anything. Trying to solve other people’s challenges and correct others’ inefficiencies is not how great discoveries are made – it never will be. It’s necessary, but it’s a barrier to significant scientific discovery.
Great scientists make observations, form hypotheses, and perform experiments (theoretical ones at the least) to confirm them. They don’t solve challenges left by other scientists’ work; that’s what people who simply want lots of publications do, because it’s easier.
Not only am I finished ahead of schedule, but I fixed one of our previous techniques as well.
Most of the hard work being done in the lab seems to fall on me (especially right before a conference deadline), but I somehow seem to be left out of the research that will actually result in publications (and when I am included in it, no one seems to care; there’s a journal paper I’ve wanted to publish since January that we keep having to add “just one more thing” to). The only major attempt that we made to publish something in my first year was a piece of research that I knew from the start would not yield good results… and by major, I mean I was told I should fix our results and write a paper up 3 days before the MICCAI conference deadline. It was rejected, of course.
Not that I particularly care whether my research is published so long as it’s available, but if I’m going to be forced to play the game, I’m going to have to play by its rules or I’ll just end up even more alienated from society.
I’m rapidly losing patience with the whole thing. Like algorithms, research in general is something I’d really like to do, but I’ll have to accept the fact that social pressure is going to make it too difficult to succeed in this area.
And if I can’t succeed, I don’t even want to start.
I just realized a great many things about science, and can chalk them all up to this: A very large majority of scientists are simply incapable of doing proper research – science in the true sense of the word; in the sense that it was practiced by Galileo, Newton, Watson, and Crick.
So they write. They write and write, and produce mountains of garbage. This garbage is published because it’s become the status quo, and other researchers marvel at how much trash a particular researcher managed to spew out in a particular publication, or how many times this process has been repeated with a few words shuffled around.
When they find graduate students, bright young minds lacking only training, they train them to spew out more trash of their own (usually with the advisor’s name attached – this apprenticeship is not an altruistic one) so they’ll find good jobs as academics, where they can perpetuate the cycle.
The reason that science advances at all is because every so often, someone comes along who can (and, more importantly, will) think, who can experiment, and who actually had the freedom to do just that. This doesn’t take anything extraordinary – just patience, training, a small amount of intelligence, lots of time, and complete intellectual freedom.
But maybe that is extraordinary these days.
I am about to attempt to publish four papers simultaneously. At least three of them will probably be accepted. I’d say “wish me luck”, but it’s a little late for that.
I just finished my MS project… in a week. I had three months to do it.
In other news, Google did not offer me the job after all those months of interviewing. Pity; I could have done the same for them. If they behave like they did during the Summer of Code, I’ll find them using the ideas I presented at the interviews a few months from now despite this. Apparently one interview (of about 10 – the only one I didn’t solve the problem for, and even then I had the right idea) really is enough to screw up the entire process. A series of consensus interviews seems more a test of luck than actual ability.
Projects should not be “bursty”. I shouldn’t have to sit idle for months only to receive five new projects in the span of a week. I should be notified of conference deadlines at least one month in advance per paper that I will be submitting. If I’m working on other projects at the moment, the remaining work should either be queued (such that the deadline on at least one of the projects is going to slip) or given to someone who is less busy.
I’m still waiting to do real research – you know, forming hypotheses, creating experiments, … not just writing papers. It’s a pity, though not a surprise, that this is what my life has become.
Thanks to changes in Temple’s Ph. D. program, I no longer have to take the qualifier or any additional coursework (since I’ve completed 8 courses with As). Therefore, I can theoretically complete the degree by the end of next year, though I will probably stick to the three-year plan I devised – I’m already on-track, so I’ll simply be on-track with far less work.
Now all I need is to hear back from Google and I can begin planning 2008. Yes, I try to always have a general plan one year in advance. 2007 was somewhat disappointing thus far, but I couldn’t have predicted that I’d be ripped so forcefully away from algorithms.
If one more person asks me why my work on the divisor function is applicable, I am going to scream! I’ve been mentioning Robin’s Theorem (proving a bound on the divisor function is equivalent to proving the Riemann Hypothesis) as an example of what can be done with this, but that is not why I did this research.
If Dali had to justify his paintings to the powerful, we would not have “The Persistence of Memory”. If Beethoven had to justify his works to the elite, we would not have the Moonlight Sonata. The simple act of expression is a reflection of the beauty in the soul.
It is the same with mathematics. I don’t know how significant my result is (though I am sure that it is at least novel and suspect that it has a moderate degree of significance… probably not enough to prove the Riemann Hypothesis), and probably never will due to society’s refusal to accommodate my wish to pursue multidisciplinary training, but I don’t care, because I’ve effectively reduced the amortized time complexity of calculating the divisor function for sequentially-increasing values to O(n) (calculating it the old-fashioned way, by multiplying over the primes, is polynomial) in a most elegant way.
That suffices for me. If it doesn’t suffice for you, I’d say you are, mathematically, at a handicap against those with an innate sense of mathematical beauty. At the very least, you’ll lack the passion that we have.
Oh, and this doesn’t only apply to math. If you only concentrate on application, a whole world of beauty is closed to you.