Is this what everybody thought was going on within our physics PhD programs? Jeff Schmidt was known as a very talented editor at Physics Today for 19 years before he was fired for writing this book …
Beginning physics graduate students must devote an entire year or two
of their lives to homework. Indeed, the first part of physics
graduate school is well described as a boot camp based on homework.
One characteristic of any boot camp is that the subject matter the
instructors present in their day-to-day work is not really the main
thing they are teaching. Teaching the subject matter is certainly one
goal, but it is not the main one. In military boot camp, for example,
drill instructors make recruits spend large amounts of time learning
to dress to regulation, march in precise formation, chant ditties,
disassemble and reassemble rifles, carry heavy backpacks, and so on,
yet the main goal of all this is something much more profound: to
create soldiers who will follow orders, even to their deaths.
Similarly, the most apparent goal of graduate physics courses is to
indoctrinate the students into the dominant paradigms, or theoretical
frameworks, of physics. But the primary goal is to train physicists
who will maintain tremendous discipline on assigned problems. (p129)At the end of the [qualifying examination] week the entire physics faculty gathers in a closed
meeting to decide the fate of the students. Strange as it may seem,
in most physics departments a student’s score on the test is only one
factor in the faculty’s decision as to whether or not that student has
passed the test. Students are not usually told their scores: this
gives faculty members the option of deciding that a student has failed
the test even if that student has outscored someone they are going to
pass. In arriving at their personal opinions on whether to pass or
fail a student, individual faculty members consider anything and
everything carried away from informal discussions with the student and
with others around the department.A faculty member who talks informally with a student in the hallway or
at the weekly after-colloquium reception inevitably comes away with a
feeling about whether or not that student ‘thinks like a physicist.’
The student’s political outlook can easily make a difference in the
faculty member’s assessment. For example, in the usual informal
discussion of an issue in the news, the student who rails against
technical incompetence and confines his thoughts to the search for
technical solutions within the given political framework builds a much
more credible image as a professional physicist than does the student
who emphasizes the need to alter the political framework as part of
the solution. Indeed, the latter approach falls outside the work
assignments given to professional physicists in industry and academe
and so represents thinking unlike a physicist’s. (p134)
