Daily Archives: September 8, 2010

I'm Not Willing to Believe You

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Question: How long would your Ph.D. have taken if everything worked?

We can use mine as an example. I did my grad studies in Microbiology and Immunology, but basically I was doing biochemistry type work (cancer research with a lot of molecular stuff). It took me just over five years to finish this sucker which is pretty typical in North America. Of course, when I take a critical look at my thesis and calculate: “What if this thesis literally shows all of my work, because everything I did, worked? What if I had magic fingers throughout my research and never had a failed experiment!?”

Using this rubric, I calculate that my Ph.D. in biochemistry/molecular biology type work could’ve taken about, DUM-DUM-DUM…

 

6 months

 

Note that this figure also includes the 3 months needed to write the damn thesis itself! This means that technically my thesis is reflective of only 3 months of successful experiments: or as I like to think of it — four and a half years of failed experiments!

Bull.

OK, it’s possible that the pathway to a degree in Microbiology and Immunology is very different from that of physics, but other than the subject matter, I don’t think so. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one’s thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that’s not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation — you can’t just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don’t believe it.

To get my physics degree, I had a summer research grant, followed by two years of classes, along with part-time research, before more than three years of full-time research, then writing. I didn’t come into an established lab; I arrived at grad schools the same year my eventual thesis advisor did, so building up the lab took some time. I could have saved some time if things hadn’t broken — a hole in a new vacuum chamber, requiring it to be dismantled and sent back for repair, a broken feedthrough and ion gauge, problems with the atomic beam oven, lasers dying left and right. All of that added to the time it took, but I didn’t know anything about trapping atoms when I started in the lab, and you can’t fake that experience. Even if you start in an established lab, with more senior students to teach you the ropes, it’s going to take time to learn how all the equipment works and how to run everything. Best case for me, I think, would have been four years — two in the classroom and two in the lab. In reality, it was just a titch over six years from start to turning in the finished copy of my thesis.

Anyone out there with realistic estimates of how long your grad school career would have been, had everything gone right? Compare with the actual.

Uncertainty Squared

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Uncertain Principles: What Uncertainty Means to Me– And You, and the Universe

One of the most (if not the most) commonly maltreated physics concepts in journalism is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

[T]he origin of uncertainty really does spring from the idea of particle-wave duality rather than any ideas related to the act of measurement. It comes from the fact that, fundamentally, the position of a quantum object, like an electron or a photon, is a particle-like characteristic, while its momentum is associated with the wave nature of the object. Mathematically, the momentum of a quantum object is given by Planck’s constant divided by its wavelength (or, equivalently, the wavelength associated with a quantum object is determined by Planck’s constant divided by its momentum).

Perhaps we can start up the group Physicists For The Proper Treatment of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or PFTPTHUP (which would sound like blowing a raspberry, or Bill the Cat hacking up a furball, either of which could be one’s reaction to seeing the HUP abused in the media)