mountaineers and physicists

I wished I had more to say on this matter. With memories of undergraduate days as a physics major far behind me, I find myself short of opinions. This post had been in draft status for far too long...

More than a year after Lee Smolin’s article “Why No ‘New Einstein’?” (registration required) appeared in the June 2005 issue of Physics Today, the discussion continues on this page. Scroll to the bottom of the page for his response.

I like Weinstein's analogy between physicists and mountaineers. There are physicists, and then there are physicists. I see this amongst my fellow physics majors in college. There are the technically and mathematically deft ones. Then there are those who will keep the professors on their feet with the deep, and important questions. We also have the gifted experimentalists, and the ones who never run out of random, out-of-the-world ideas. The latter are great to have around in the nights when we'd otherwise only have our problem sets for company. Some of us are a bit of each.

I place myself in the first category, that of the technical climber. That may come as no surprise, for "technical climbing skills" are highly valued today, as Smolin had alluded to in the article. It comes as even less of a surprise if we consider the academic climate I was brought up in, prior to my college days. For middle and high school students here, one's performance at academic activities with easily quantifiable outcomes, for example, exams, science competitions, and olympiads, is generally regarded to be indicative of one's competence in the (science) subject. With elements of school rivalry and national pride mixed in, some students grow to approach these events with the spirit of competitive sports. The mountaineer analogy becomes more vivid here. Consequently, it is "technical climber type" who receive the most commendations, awards and peer admiration, and get upheld as models of success. To be fair, there are research opportunities (aka lab-rat stints, hah) at the middle-high school levels, where students get to develop scientific competencies beyond technical/exam abilities. Accomplishments in these programs, however, are not celebrated and understood quite as much by the masses. It is the "technical climbers" who derived enough confidence to further their studies in the discipline they were deemed to be good at. It is thus no accident that science majors from this land tend to be "technical climbers" who do well on exams and calculations, but fall a tad short in the imaginative and creative dimensions.

I'm not calling for a de-emphasis on the promotion of "technical climbing skills". Rather, I'm in agreement with Smolin's proposal to promote and recognise more of the valley crosser types and I'd like to see that happen at pre-college levels. But I suspect that the solution would take a shift of beliefs entrenched in our students and educators here, more so than a policy change.

Chasing shadows... I don't want to see it end in November.