About the "army of dwarves"

  

The minions of thorin oakenshield arrival to the battle of the five armies.

An spanish blogger, Francis, wrote an entire about the very sad recent death of the great Steven Weinberg. In that entire he used an expression that I had never heard, but that I find very accurate. He opposed the figure of a giant like Weinberg to the nowadays status in physics that he referred like "an army of dwarves" .

Francis doesn't talk too much about the meaning of that expression, but it is self evident: one of the giants of the past (remember the Newton expression "in shoulders of giants") wrote a key paper and some significant part of physics changed forever. And some of the greatest of the pasto could write a few bunch of those papers. Now, on the contrary, most papers are coauthored by many people. They write ten or more papers, similar to others of other groups of peoples working on the very narrow area of physic and the field barely changes, if at any.

How have we arrived at this point? 

First I would say some things about Steven Weinberg. He was the most prominent figure, together with Gerard t'hoofs, of the generation that created the standard model. That generation culminated the work of all the twenty century physics in a beautiful model and they can claim that they have been the last generation of theoretical physicists that have achieved a verified success. The next generation bring first supersymmetry and later string theory, that were well motivated theories, but they can't claim the same level of success. Subsequents generations working on that topics have desvirtuarted the field to the point that I would call it hypothetical physics instead of theoretical. Since a time I am beginning to say as a joke? that I am in the field of death sciences, in the same sense that latin and old greek are  death languages.

 One more thing about Steven Weinberg. Despite it's big influence he couldn't convince the USA government to build the SLC (superlunar colder) which took his county out of the leadership of particle physics, in favor of Europe and it's CERN colliders. Possibly, but it is imposible to know, it has slowed down the progress of particle physics for decades because, maybe, it could have found new physics that can't hardly be found in hadronic, circular, colliders. That moment is also related to the time the USA changed it's economical structure into a country that has, since them, become less and less attractive for people with an interest in pure science, but the details of that are another story.

Going back to the dwarves I'll introduce another term "academically correct" that refers to articles that are analogies of the more pejorative aspect of "politically correct", that is, articles that are formally correct, but low risk. that lack any aspiration of any major originality, because, you know, if you deviate from the stablemen you "don't appear in the photo". That is, your article is not cited, and probably even readed, and that means that your have no points in your CV to for the 50+ applies for a new two years scolarship you could get, if you are very lucky, in whoever knows which lost place of the world.

 Even if your are world famous physics it's easy that none reads you if you are too original. That has happened to Gerard t'hoof, with it's search of a relationship between fluid dynamics and quantum mechanic, to Penrose in may of this works, but also to, for example, Nima Arkani-Hamed. I was two year ago to a congress in Madrid about the topic of the swampland, where assisted Vaffa (he has published an important article in the subject by that time), and two major experts in superstring phenomenology in Europe, Luis Ibañez, and Dieter Last, among many others.  The last day arrived Nima, to give two speaks. He talked, among other things, about his work in the amplithuedron, and, despite it's prestige, and that everybody knew the existence of that line of work, and that they had the general idea that it should probably interesting, I got the impression that none on the audience had actually read in deep anything about that line of investigation.

Why is people going into that behaviour. That is a controversial question. Maybe, if you are a neoliberal, you could consider that it's because of lack of competence. But that doesn't fit to really, because, as stated, people in academy already are under extreme pressure to get even the worst, bad payed scholarships in remote places, even if you have been the best of your generation at your university and have, since them, made some hard work in some important universities on your field (I know some cases that fit that profile). Also you can say that is because there is too much "leftism", with a loose of meritocracy because of a desire of inclusion. And that, depending of your area of investigation (that applies outside of physic mainly) there are tabu topics, and probably that is true. I would say that now the academic world is a place that has to face the worst part of the neoliberal polictics (that fit very bad the requirements of research in pure science) and of leftists politics. The result is that the academic world is loosing importance.

That leads to "scientific work" outside academy. That is an oxymoron of course. There is not such a thing as scientific work outside academy. It is technological work (ok, in some very excepcional case it can be applied science, but never pure research). 

Nowadays mathematics, and variants, such as "mathematical engineers", statics and alike are very demanded for certain kind of works in enterprises, in areas such as "financial economy" (another oxymoron), assurance companies and "big data" and "machine/deep learning". Well, that people are actual mathematics of the same type that Nicola Tesla was a physicist, i.e. they are not at all.

The point is that in a globalized world, where neoliberals govern economy, everything is modeled in enterprises, and more people on enterprises have no idea about how science works, They have no idea on the difference between pure science, applied science and technology. It doesn't mean that they are stupid or bad people (many of them are for sure, but also for sure there are very competent, smart and good people). But the thing is that most people in the world neither have a glance of the details of science, including the people that surround that dirigentes, and because they are rich, sucesfull people, they think that, enforcing academy to work like their enterprises they will get better science, or, worst still, that the right place of a scientific is working on an enterprise, when the fact is that purse science simply doesn't exist in the enterprise, and that, if pure science freezes applied science comes a few years later, and, at the final point technology also freezes, and possibly we have already arrived there.