An open letter to all physicists

By G. O. Okeng'o

What's happening to the subject we have all loved and served?

More than any other discipline, physics has transformed the face of civilization, particularly during the last century. It has developed techniques and insights that have propelled chemistry, biology and medicine to new heights. It has led to the genesis of modern engineering and has created vast industries, such as energy, communications, computing and the broadcast media. It has been the winner of wars and preserver of peace. It has played a seminal role in the emergence and development of the Internet, one of the most significant new communication media in history. As we march through the 21^st century, its potential for economic and social innovation remains greater than ever.

  Yet as we survey the state of physics as a viable enterprise, the signs of accelerating decay and decline are distressingly clear. The number and calibre of students and teachers that it attracts are falling alarmingly. Academic departments are shrinking, amalgamating and closing. Corporate physics labs are deemed to be an extravagance in the era of deregulation and "market forces". Morale in the global community of physicists is waning as professional positions, research grants and fellowships continue to diminish. Among non-physicists, and particularly among non-scientific decision makers in politics and business, physics is perceived to have had its day, never again to merit the pivotal position that it held during the 20th century. Physics is in crisis, it would seem, and the future is believed to belong to biotechnology and software engineering.

Some analysis before prognosis

It is vital that we, as physicists, analyse the current crisis carefully before rushing to embrace easy answers and shallow remedies. It is sometimes assumed, for example, that it will be enough merely to publicize what we do - that the root of the problems of our subject is a simple inability to market it as aggressively as those in biotechnology or IT, for example, manage to do. Certainly we must take these elementary steps, difficult though they may be for us physicists, who have always considered the worth of our subject as self-evident. However, we must delve more deeply into the state of physics and physics education, asking difficult and embarrassing questions. For example, has physics lost its intellectual appeal as the basis for all science and engineering? Does physics training still provide the talents needed at the cutting edge of technology? Have our courses and research programmes adapted to the rapidly changing dynamics of university education, as it evolves from serving an elite group of school leavers to providing advanced vocational education for a large cross-section of society? Have we adapted to the new reality of the pace and scope of innovation and investment in high-tech industry, as the new knowledge-based economies place ever greater emphasis on intellectual property and the laws of increasing returns?

   Nothing has provoked these questions and their attendant doubts as much as the advent of IT and the Internet, where the value of bits is emphasized while the value of atoms is taken for granted. There are, it appears, no atoms in cyberspace.

Is physics simply too successful?

In many ways, physics has been a victim of its own successes. We have helped to create a rapidly changing world, in which microscopes, telescopes, space vehicles, MRI scanners, mobile phones, lasers, DNA- sequencing equipment and the rest are yesterday's news. We cannot compete with the palpable sense of excitement created by popular books such as Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, in which it is assumed that physicists and electronic engineers will continue to do their jobs so well that unlimited computing power, data-storage capacity and communication bandwidth can be taken for granted by the software engineers.

   Our systems are so capable and reliable that they have become transparent - the performance of practical systems being limited only by software glitches and limited user understanding of the vast networks that we provide. Packet-switched data networks are so versatile that they will one day probably cost their users nothing apart from a modest access fee. (Perhaps we should build fibre-optic systems and digital radio transmitters that cost a fortune to use and break down more often so that our crucial role will become more apparent.) There are, in fact, many atoms in cyberspace, but they perform so flawlessly that only the antics of the bits and pixels that they support are visible to the world at large.
    At the other end of the spectrum, our research into the "external" frontiers of physics - fundamental areas such as high- energy physics, cosmology, gravitation and quantum physics, in which we are pushing to the limits of energy, time and distance - has succeeded so well and progressed so far that it has become incomprehensible to all but a few specialists. Large-scale transnational efforts are often required, in which politics and economics can dominate and obscure the physics. Whether looking at bits, quarks or plasma ignition -or in many other cases where physics has a vital role to play- the importance of physics is invisible to non- physicists. Clearly our communication and marketing skills need to be developed and used in earnest, and they must be directed at the future rather than the past.
   Then there is the anti-science culture that is rising steadily in most countries. Again much of the blame can be laid at the door of the practitioners: our successes have distanced physicists from the public, making us appear mysterious or arrogant. We have become closely identified with the military- industrial complex. We are blamed for releasing the twin genies of nuclear fission and thermonuclear weapons. Such is the level of distrust that we have engendered that even the power lines and cellular communication masts required by the rapid growth of new industries are believed to cause health hazards comparable to those of industrial pollution or tobacco smoking. Scientists are believed to be part of the problem rather than the solution.

   And what of our relationship with the vast physics-based industries that drive the developed world's economies? In the past, physicists have had so many choices and career options that we have kept only the most intellectually stimulating and academically respectable topics (in our opinion) and abandoned many of the more mundane but useful technologies and industries to the engineers. The contrast with chemistry- and biology-based industries is striking: to pursue a career in these industries one needs a degree in the core scientific discipline, whereas to enter physics-based industries it is usually easier if one has a degree in some branch of engineering. Physics is erroneously seen by many employers as being too abstract and esoteric for their needs.


What are the solutions to this problem?


The crisis now facing physics and physicists is a multi-layered one that has developed over decades. To resolve it we will need a careful, considered and strategic response, not merely for physics graduates working as engineers or IT specialists. We must make university physics courses more attractive and accessible to a range of students. However, we should avoid at all costs the temptation to "dumb down" to garner popularity: it would be far better to build a new education and training structure to enable moderately able students to master difficult material. Instead of the forbidding quasi-professional primary physics degrees offered in most universities, with their steep learning curves, we should seriously consider schemes where students accumulate credits at a flexible pace toward broader primary degrees. Students would then learn to understand and use physics in context with mathematics, computing, chemistry, biology and engineering, and sample topics from the humanities and business studies. For those wishing to become professional physicists, this broader first degree would be topped up by a sharper, more focused, professionally accredited postgraduate degree involving vocational training and experience.
   The 21st century requires new interdisciplinary insights and work habits, and we need to develop and position physics as an ideal basis for this continually evolving mode of education and working. A physicist should be seen as a person who can enhance any scientific activity or industry, because of both specific technical training, and general problem formulation and solving skills. Physics applied to economics and finance should be encouraged and researched rather than lamented as a waste of talent.
   We must reinvent physics to remain the basis for all science - the dynamics of bits and pixels as well as atoms and photons. This will require fundamental new approaches to information science, including (but not limited to) physical treatments of information at a quantum level. We should develop the "internal" frontiers of physics - those areas in which we are finding new insights and applications within the currently accessible regimes of time, energy and space. These include dynamical systems and control, hard and soft condensed matter, environmental physics, biophysics, ultrafast optics and nanoscale electronics. Such topics should connect naturally and seamlessly with developments in the life sciences, information and communications technologies, energy studies and other emerging priorities. They should be accorded the same respectability as the external frontiers of physics, where elite efforts should continue for the sake of basic human curiosity.
   We must increasingly focus on those areas crucial to the benefit of humankind, including medical physics, space exploration and novel forms of energy. There must also be a continued emphasis on information. While it is impossible to set targets and deadlines in these areas, it is vital that physics and physicists should play - and be seen to play - a vital role in the continued development of the human race.
   We must persuade the politicians, captains of industry, journalists and other agents of influence that physics is an essential ingredient in the mixture of talents that is needed in the 21st century and beyond. We must restore the drive, energy and excitement to physics by reinventing both it and ourselves. We need to open up the doors and windows, clean out the cobwebs, and identify and safeguard the true treasures of physics. Only then can we set about the task of rebuilding our subject to become the basis of the new interdisciplinary science, engineering and innovation culture of the information age.

(Adapted from Prof John McInerney's article titled “How to survive in the 21^st century”, Physics World, 2000)