Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists Book

If you're a physicist, as I am, then reading this book is a bizarre experience. Yes: it's an anthropological study of…you. And, for the most part, it's quite astute. The author pitches wildly a few times on the science, doesn't understand physics education very well (see, for example, her silly claim that undergraduate coursework gives only a simplified and partial version of major topics because "novices are thought to be unsuited to a full disclosure of truth in these first years"), and says some foolish things in the epilogue. Also, her claims about the gendered-ness of research apparatus is completely absurd. Nevertheless, physics is not her field of specialty, so we have to cut her some slack. Really, though a layperson to the field, she has a solid grasp of a lot of physics and instrumentation.

I recommend this book to other physicists. For us, as physicists, to be more emotionally healthy people and to make the community more just and supportive of its members and capable of producing good science, it is valuable for us to have brought explicitly to our attention the mores and assumptions that we all share but rarely notice or acknowledge.

Among the topics to which I would particularly call attention is her analysis of anxiety within the community. She correctly observes that

"Each stage [in a physicist's training] has its characteristic anxiety: for the undergraduate it is a fear that one's own capacities are insignificant in comparison to the community. Graduate students are afraid of using up their predoctoral years working for a team whose experiments may prove unproductive; afraid of losing their chance at success by losing time. Postdocs are looking two or three years ahead, trying to anticipate rewarding questions in physics; they become anxious about the future.

"These anxieties do not disappear when the postdoc gains a permanent position; the fears of the full-fledged member of the community combine all those of the novice (fear of the accomplishments of others, fear of losing present time, fear of the future coming too fast), in somewhat revised form. The established physicists are afraid that they will not continue making significant contributions…."

Her observations about physicists' intellectual elitism and their illusion of a strict meritocracy within the field--the unexamined assumption within the community that the smartest people necessarily end up at the best institutions and with the best appointments--are definitely correct and constitute, in my opinion, serious indictments of the community's values.

Additionally, she makes a detailed analysis of gender which is--in my view, as a woman researcher--very good. I was particularly struck by an observation she makes about the relationships between male physicists and their female (non-physicist) partners/spouses, a point about which I've been bothered many times in the past: the condescension with which many male physicists regard their partners, and which the women very often accept (or actively promote) with a kind of degrading and even cringing deference to the male physicist's expertise and career.

In addition, I found it thought-provoking to read about the state of research, research technology, and research funding in the mid-1980s.