A few weeks ago I linked to a speech given by the head of a private schools organisation, in which said individual fretted about the decline in the teaching of certain subjects such as physics and foreign languages. Responses were interesting. One or two commenters thought the system is pretty good. (Yes, seriously). One fellow even claimed to be “genuinely bowled over” by how good it was. More common responses were on the lines that in a free market, if there is a shortage of folk with engineering or linguistic abilities, then sooner or later supply would come through, if not from the UK’s own workforce, then from overseas forms of supply. Up to a point I agree. As a free marketeer, it would be perverse for me to bleat about “shortages” or X and Y and then not realise that one person’s shortage is another person’s entrepreneurial opportunity.
The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have a fully free market system of education in this country, but one in which the incentive impact of price signals and salary levels gets blunted by a predominantly state-run system, with its national programmes, bureaucracies and state-mandated certificates and qualifications. This means that if there is a shortage of say, physics teachers, it may take a while for the shortage to be made up. Learning physics to a high standard can take even the brightest students quite a while. And if the supply of teachers in certain fields drops off, it can take several years to make up the gap easily, though modern technology possibly can help disseminate information more effectively than the chalk-and-blackboard approach of the past.
If, on the other hand, the scarcity of physics teachers changes slowly, then a more market-driven schooling system can react to that more nimbly. People who work in industry but who may want a less stressful life might be interested in teaching science part-time, for example. Among the greying populations of the industrialised world, there might be a potentially big pool of people who might like to teach the young but on a part-time basis.
A story here points to continued worries about what is happening with science education in this country, especially in the field of physics. I am not of course saying that the existing system can be made better by tweaking a few courses here and there. A move towards a genuine market in education is what is required over the long term.
For those who think of schooling in a post-Prussian statist mindset, you can blow out some collectivist cobwebs here and also here
I don’t think you need to worry about the rigidities of the State Education System, problematic though it undoubtedly is.
Just look at the job market, which is much closer to a genuinely free one.
Compare the starting salaries of graduate physicists with those of (say) newly-qualified electricians or plumbers.
I think that tells us pretty plainly that despite the shortcomings of the education system, we do actually have enough physicists for now.
That doesn’t necessarily mean we have “enough” physicists, simply that the market doesn’t value them highly. Since they get more money working overseas, that’s what they do. Since Britain seems to be going through a profoundly anti-intellectual phase, it doesn’t seem likely this is going to change any time soon.
Also, there’s a difference between having enough physicists to meet market demand for them and having enough physicists to meet the need for creating future generations of physicists and for enabling the market to exploit other things that depend only indirectly on having a good scientific base to your educated people.
Finally, there is time lag. From the time the pupil needs to make a decision at school to study physics until the time he graduates from university is 6 years or more. The market is not good at long term things like this, and will satisfy a future need by importing physicists from overseas. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but the effect overall is that the UK education system churns out the dolts who just about meet the market needs but tends to ignore the potential demand for more able specialists. Other education systems which don’t aim only at the lowest common denominator will then pick up the slack. That’s fair enough from a global point of view, of course, but it does only serve to reinforce the anti-intellectualism already disturbingly present in the UK.
Reliance simply on free market indicators is not enough. It is naive and simplistic, and ignores the long term complex issues of education in an increasingly sophisticated world. On the other hand, it meets many forms of libertarian assumption, so it must be right.
EG
I’m struggling to see your point there. Surely these subjects are in decline because people don’t want to learn them, not because of institutional supply problems. My old school has a dozen language teachers but only 2 people doing French A level and none at all in other languages.
I think you’re right that there are all sorts of distortions preventing sensible supply and demand. One of the main ones is that employers and universities tend to look at grades and a total points score, regardless of the difficulty (or otherwise) of the subjects, which means that students are incentivised to take easy subjects. So why would you study physics and German when you can have a much easier and more enjoyable life doing media studies and theatre, if the end result is the same?
And I didn’t say I was bowled over by the system as a whole, I said I was bowled over by the quality of primary school teaching that my kids are getting compared to what I had. I don’t really see the need for you to carry on ridiculing that point of view.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean we have “enough” physicists, simply that the market doesn’t value them highly”
Well that’s the point. We have the number of physicists the market wants. What other measure of economic needs would you use?
Of course there are other factors. A graduate physicist earns less than a plumber but the gap closes over lifetime earnings. There might also be a higher disutility to working as a plumber than in a graduate job (dictating a lower wage).
As for generating future generations of physicists, what makes you think the central planner is better able to predict the right number than the market?
Switching decision making to the central planner is what has given us the “dolts” our univesities are “churning out”. Without state interference we would probably have more plumbers and those taking degrees would have a greater incentive to take hard subjects.
The time lag is not a major problem because we have experienced no spike in the demand for physicists. Demand is rising slowly and steadily which allows the market to plan more easily.
What is naive and simplistic is to assume that because a problem is sophisticated, it requires brainpower to applied by a central planner. In fact there is far information and intellect available to individual market agents (and let’s not forget, we’re talking about actual rocket scientists here) than any central authority could ever muster.
Clearly, the market does seem to be working (despite the constraints imposed by a state-controlled education system). I recently heard the head of one of the UK’s professional associations say that last year, for the first time in several years, university applications to study engineering outnumbered those to read ‘media studies’.
His explanation was simple. ‘Media studies’ graduates can’t get jobs. Engineers are in demand. Since the advent of student loans, this factor has concentrated minds wonderfully.
Since Britain seems to be going through a profoundly anti-intellectual phase
Euan, this has been the case throughout my life; certainly since my (working class, if it matters) father was bullied at work for allowing his son to take up the place he won at the evil, divisive, selective Grammar School. I now pay for my children’s education and hope they will gain the qualifications they will need to move overseas, to where their educational achievements, whatever they may be, will be respected. I shall be moving myself, but there are valid reasons why I can’t go just yet.
Johnathan
As Pete points out, neither schools nor students are penalised for not taking “hard” subjects like Physics. If you were 14yrs old and faced with the choice between learning about David Beckham (here), for those who think i’m joking) and Thermodynamics, what would you do?
It is only when students emerge from University, with a 2:1 in the Life of Posh and Becks, that they realise what a waste of time and money the last five years have been.
Andrew misses the point when he refers to the low starting salary of Physics grads. The City is full of Physics grads, all pulling in six figure salaries before their 25th birthday. Physics students are found in all manner of highly paid jobs because their degree tells an employer one crucial fact – they are obviously bright.
So how do we incentivise 14yr olds to study physics and schools to teach it?
An ability to take a longer term view than the free market does is also necessary. The market is not the highest arbiter of everything.
But our culture is one focused on the short term, with its inculcated belief in the good of immediate satisfaction and a reluctance to wait for things.
No, what’s done that is a social engineering desire to ensure everyone leaves school with a piece of paper (which is thus valueless), a general social view that puts a value on a degree irrespective of subject (i.e. which prizes media studies as much as particle physics) and an economic bias towards non-innovative solutions implemented by “practical men” rather than highly educated specialists. The first two are relatively recent, but the last has been recognised as a British problem for over a century.
There is a view, to which I subscribe, that it is in fact a dearth of strategic thought in education which has led to the current situation. I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that state interference in the UK has been particularly beneficial (although it historically has been in many other states), but it is clear enough that countries which do produce large numbers of highly skilled specialists either have a strategically thought out education system or have an industrial base which prizes innovation. In Britain, we have neither.
We’re not. We’re talking about people who may in the future become rocket scientists. There is a difference.
If we need rocket scientists in the future, they will be educated overseas. That’s ok from a global point of view, but it is a waste of human potential.
EG
Claude, you’re a sketch.
Supply, demand and a small world.
A friend of mine is a microbiologist, currently starting on a masters degree after working in his field for a year. The jobs in his field dont pay that well in the UK but do in Singapore and Germany. He doesnt fancy the far east but likes Berlin – so in addition to his masters, he studies german….guess where he will get a job.
I feel somewhat undervalued in my job – not getting paid for my skill set (Geek consultant) so im looking either to start my own company or move to Holland/Spain where the wages are better.
the media studies fad seems to be ending as people are learning that £15000 of debt is a lot to pay off with no job.
In most industries, if a single entity becomes a dominant supplier, it will do what all such dominant suppliers do: provide the market with what it wants to supply and “educate” us to want it. It’s called “producer capture” and is why Microsoft’s engineers produced the “clippy” helper; why British Leyland equipped the Allegro with a “quartic” steering wheel; why the BBC’s journalism has atrophied to “Katrina” and “Dead Parrot!” standards; and why the state education system no longer teaches the “hard” subjects.
and why the state education system no longer teaches the “hard” subjects.
The problem, as somebody else pointed out, is that students don’t want to take the hard subjects either.
There are many things the market is great for, I’m not entirely convinced that this is one of them. There are large lead times and, generally, the UK has never been fond of particularly the hard sciences – even though we have a good track record in them.
I suggest reading the excellent _Mauve_ about the creation of the Chemical Industry in the 19th century for a great view of the barriers that academia in the UK through up to basic science practice.
I have a few friends with Physics degree and better and not one of them works in Physics; they all work in IT of one form or another. The issue is now, if you want a career in IT you do an IT based degree. That wasn’t the case 20 years ago, as IT qualifications were still a pretty dark art. A degree in physics would get you into Unix Admin, software engineering and a bunch of other things.
EG: […] a general social view that puts a value on a degree irrespective of subject […]. Indeed, added to a strange innumerate, economically illiterate economism. The value put on a degree is largely, if not wholly, a material one.
In that view education is just a means of increasing the economic utility of the individual. It is equated with training for a labour market without structure or elasticity. The above-average wealth and productivity of graduates currently in the workforce is assumed in this particular brand of idiocy to arise simply because they belong to the magic category of graduates. More people labelled as ‘graduate’ means more wealth for society, the ultimate good.
There is an alternative hypothesis: That ‘graduate’ in earlier generations was a label for the brightest and/or hardest working and/or richest-parented individuals who would naturally populate the higher social strata through whatever social mobility there was. Of course (statistically-speaking) they were much better off than average when they represented 5% and then 10% of their age-cohort. Even with 50% of the population graduates, if the same processes apply, graduates will be better-off than average, but the “value” of a degree will be much less (of the order of the standard deviation of incomes).
However, there’s some reason to suspect that the graduate ‘benefit’ may weaken as the proportion of graduates increases.
I should clarify that last paragraph. What I mean is that degrees may distinguish 50% of the population as “more capable” less reliably than they did 5% in the past. It is not just a matter of (vastly) more boundary cases, but:
1. In a delicious inversion of the utilitarian vision, the diversion of resources to edutraining becomes so great that scholarships on any relevant scale become impossible and social fluidity in the graduate caste vanishes.
2. The marginal value of graduate status is overtaken by the time-loss involved for a greater and greater proportion of energetic people in a hurry, as opposed to the small talent-elite who previously skipped the formal processes. As the official education route serves the mediocre more, it has less to offer the able.
I have never understood what a degree in Media Studies was going to accomplish for those working for it. Who did they think was going to hire them?
Who’s going to hire someone with a degree in David Beckham? These things are terrible con on naive young people who think life really is going to be this easy and this much fun. What about all those people who took degrees in Surfing at some Welsh university – or maybe it was Cornwall? What are they doing now? Still paying off their debt for their worthless degrees?
I am one of those people with a mediocre physics degree that works in IT. After I graduated I tried teaching for a couple of years but it didn’t suit me. The main challenge of secondary education is managerial, not intellectual, and physics is definitely intellectual. Teaching is also rather repetitive once you have got two years of lesson-prep under your belt, but kids remain kids and are totally unforgiving, so it’s still very hard work. Moreover, state schools are credentialist rather than meritocratic and can therefore be frustrating for the clever (yeah, physics = clever while media studies = not so much. Get over it) So the first strike against physics is that teaching physics in state schools sucks.
The other outlets for mediocre physicists are medical physics and power station physics. Both are highly responsible but rotten tedious (imo). Heaven help us if anyone creative ever gets one of these jobs. Think Chernobyl! So that’s a second hefty strike against physics as a career choice.
Finally, remember the Big Hole? That huge accelerator the Americans were building in Texas? When that got canned it threw 10,000 PhD-level physicists out of work. Now that’s what I call a third strike. Jeez, I didn’t even know that many physicists were alive.
I am one of those people with a mediocre physics degree that works in IT. After I graduated I tried teaching for a couple of years but it didn’t suit me. The main challenge of secondary education is managerial, not intellectual, and physics is definitely intellectual. Teaching is also rather repetitive once you have got two years of lesson-prep under your belt, but kids remain kids and are totally unforgiving, so it’s still very hard work. Moreover, state schools are credentialist rather than meritocratic and can therefore be frustrating for the clever (yeah, physics = clever while media studies = not so much. Get over it) So the first strike against physics is that teaching physics in state schools sucks.
The other outlets for mediocre physicists are medical physics and power station physics. Both are highly responsible but rotten tedious (imo). Heaven help us if anyone creative ever gets one of these jobs. Think Chernobyl! So that’s a second hefty strike against physics as a career choice.
Finally, remember the Big Hole? That huge accelerator the Americans were building in Texas? When that got canned it threw 10,000 PhD-level physicists out of work. Now that’s what I call a third strike. Jeez, I didn’t even know that many physicists were alive.
I don’t think that we need to worry about turning out more second rate physicists and, having watched people come from industry to work in a further education college for a “less stressful life” run back to industry in horror at the pressures in education, I cannot see this to be a fruitful source of teachers.
Less people take physics as they aren’t any good at it and don’t enjoy it. Let’s leave it for those that are and do. That is a consistent libertarian position.
The problem with a full market system, where the only signal is price, lies in maintaining capacity for such necessary, but expensive studies. The high demand for the arts, in both the formal and informal education sectors, reflects the fact that demand is not solely based on price, but on personal, and even therapeutic, factors.
We do not have a market system in education, instead we have quasi-market mechanisms being used to impose a directive, state controlled agenda. My own field of adult education currently shows this with the withdrawal of subsidy to liberal learning and the pursuit of a relentlessly utilitarian agenda, which says to those with low incomes that you can only do NVQ level 2, parenting skills or the like, devastating the service.
Here is the second dilemma of markets. Where access to the market is unequal then demand is shaped only by those who can pay at the point of entry. However, as we live in a tax paying state those, especially the elderly, who have already paid a lifetime of taxes now see the benefits of their involuntary investment, which they provided for others for all their working lives, being denied them as government redirects funding to whatever strategy they wish to adopt to make us conform to the standards of “citizenship” they wish to impose. Here’s to a nation of Art Historian plumbers!
As a guy with a degree in physics, which I still use a fair bit, it looks to me (from the Buckingham University’s work and all the comment thereon) as if studying the sociology of physicists has become more important than the study of physics itself.
Best regards
And the value of a good for which there is no demand whatsoever is measured precisely how? The value attached by society to goods is decided by supply and demand whether or not a price is charged for it.
(I define “good” in the broadest possible sense.)
Why aren’t engineers teaching physics at the A levels in the UK? The physics department in my school is comprised of about 60% engineering majors, with the rest physics majors handling the more difficult topics. Much of what they learn at the A level is mostly mechanics and electricity anyway, so no big deal that physics majors aren’t teaching the subject.
And physics at the graduate level is tough. Only the top students can handle quantum mechanics and the esoteric math.
Concerning the A levels, a colleague of mine told me that the syllabus has been pared down in recent years to counter dropping enrollment rates. The downside, he told me, was that he had a lot more ground to cover for the physics olympiad. Nobody even got past the first round this year. I also saw the recent paper 1(MCQ) for the A levels(doing invigilation). Piece of cake.
I tend to agree with Euan that the market is unable to function efficiently in education. However, I don’t think the loss in efficiency necessitates the state gambling on future needs either. And the state gambling on future needs is exactly what’s this entire discussion about.
I want to come back to the point about “producer capture” in education. The crucial question to ask is not: “Why are more people taking media studies than physics?” but “How on earth did media studies get on the curriculum in the first place?” If you make “easy” (ie, less expensive in terms of time and effort for the pupils) choices available, then simply economics tells you more people will take them.
Hell, that’s why I took economics A level all those years ago – it was so damned easy, compared with Physics (which, yup, I dropped).
So who decided that media studies was to be a choice? Not the pupils, not the parents. No this “cheap” choice was introduced by the producers – the educationalists. And they could do it only because the state-sector is a virtual monopoly supplier. Producer capture, in short.
Outside the state monopoly, physics remains taught – indeed, I understand that the government now frets that physics departments in universities are now essentially populated by pupils from the private sector.
Diversity studies, anyone?
But something can have a value even if there is no demand for it. As has been pointed out above, people will tend to take the easy option and thus there is a value put on that. The harder option may have a lower value put on it, but that does not mean that the harder option is not more desirable or more beneficial than the easier option. A simple supply and demand analysis doesn’t work for things like that, and thus the market isn’t necessarily the best mechanism for ensuring it is provided.
Like the commenter above, I think the market mechanism is great for many things, but not all. IMO, education is one of the things it isn’t particularly good at, due in large part to the long time lag between demand and supply.
EG
Pete, just to clarify: I was not picking on you (well, only a teensy-weensy bit). I was just reminded of your view about the current system when I read the Telegraph story about physics in decline. My first thought was to re-visit the issue. If you still think our schooling system is better than when you were a child, then all I can say is that I think you are taking only a partial view of the matter from your own experience, which I certainly would not dismiss out of hand. (And you seem to be a highly articulate guy, so your schooling must have been pretty good).
Durham University carried out a survey of reading and vocabulary skills among 11-year-olds in 122 primary schools. It found that between 1997 and 2002, there was no improvement (source: The Welfare State We’re In, James Bartholomew). Yes, that is a five-year span during which some changes to the schooling system were introduced. Perhaps it would be interesting to study the same group of people in a decade’s time.
Folks: I think I made it pretty clear in the post that the market, even in the imperfect one we have, can respond to changing patterns in demand for stuff like science skills – in the long-run. But that is the point. The purpose of a broad, liberal education is to fire curiosity of children in a number of fields. My worry is that this excitement of curiosity is not happening as much as it should. Perhaps I am being unduly gloomy (I hope so.)
Michael
That media studies is on the curriculum is indeed appalling and is the direct function of a failing monopoly producer.
This is a difficult subject for believers in free markets like myself because normally one would just assume that the market will supply what the consumers want. However children are not in a position to be able to choose for themselves and have to be guided.
Aged 14, i wanted to study history but was “guided” by my father to take Maths. I wasn’t thrilled at the time but am eternally grateful now. Children cannot be offered soft options aged 14 because they will always take them. Ten years later they will angrily ask why noone persuaded them against taking the “Culture Studies” “exam”.
However, the state is not quite a monopoly provider in education as many private schools have woken up to the joke that is A levels and are now offering the Baccalaureat – a much more rigorous exam.
In the City, Economics degrees no longer suffice. The CFA exam has become the new must have qualification. Entrants have soared and the pass rate has plummeted in response.
A bit off-topic, but why has an internal market in which parents are supposed to choose schools produced a market in which schools choose students?
Three small observations.
1) Physics graduates used to become untrained electrical/electronic engineers. Now apparently they become untrained ITers.
2) Within two years of taking it, my daughter regretted choosing the “softest” of her GCSEs viz Drama.
3) As Science, Engineering and Language departments at Uni fill up with private school pupils, the govt’s anti-meritocratic Uni admission policies will make it harder for such pupils to enter the softer subjects at the best Unis, giving private school pupils even more incentive to study the sciences and languages. What an interesting route to a caste society.
Michael Taylor-You dropped physics in favor of economics at the A levels? Ack, I took both, and got an A for physics while only a B for my economics, the only B for my A levels. If not for that, I would have gotten straight As. ARRRRGGHHH!!!
Johnathan-I agree somewhat. However, there’s a pervasive stench of anti-intellectualism in modern society that I could never quite understand the causes for. Maybe it’s because people don’t perceive scientists as being ‘hip’ or ‘cool’, or that research, reading, and thinking are essentially introvert activities that only a minority of the population is ever bothered with.
Kinda goes back to the extrovert/introvert discussion a few days ago. And I think society’s disposition towards the E/I split is partly the cause for the general disregard for science.
As long as that exists, it is certainly possible that the market, by dint of such societal pressures, would never provide the optimal numbers of physicists because insufficient children never get enthusiastic enough about the subject to pursue it seriously.
Wobbly Guy,
I wonder whether the present generation will still be bugged (albeit gently?) years later like us with the memories of grades dropped / choices made at A level? If everyone gets As anyway, it seems unlikely.
The Telegraph (Wednesday) has some letters under “Heroes of physics belie its present status”, at URL (at least for today) of:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?menuId=1588&menuItemId=-1&view=DISPLAYCONTENT&grid=P8&targetRule=0
I particularly noted the comment of physicist S.G. Forrester of Maidenhead:
“This is a crisis that Britain has brought upon itself. Where else are you considered educated if you can quote from Shakespeare but are lowbrow if you have a science degree?”
For myself, injecting scientific knowledge into a conversation, to help a drifting or off-target debate, more often than not gets me examined as some strange, perhaps alien, lifeform. After an embarrassing gap, someone changes the subject.
Best regards
Nigel, interesting observation. I wonder how general this issue with science is?
I find Nigel’s observation quite true. When I mix with people who graduated from the arts or humanities, I notice that any remarks I make that involve scientific knowledge quickly end up the same way as Nigel described. People just aren’t comfortable with it.
This doesn’t happen very often, since I’m lucky enough to have enough friends who are interested and knowledgeable about science. But it’s still troubling when it happens.
Nigel
Is the lack of interest in physics more because there has been very little progress over the past fifty years? Contrast with Biochemistry which has been revolutionised in the space of the last twenty years.
Also, the commercial opportunities in biotechnoogy vastly outweigh those in physics.
@pommygranate: I don’t particularly wish to be argumentative, so please forgive me for being so. I think it’s on grounds of accuracy.
Firstly, my comment was injection of scientific knowledge, not just physics.
Secondly, all science derives from physics. Chemistry is “just” a rather important branch of applied quantum electrodynamics; on this look at the advances made through use of “computational chemistry”, which models said electrodynamics, thus allowing rapid “experimentation” by computer simulation. Biochemistry is an important sub-branch of chemistry; it has benefited particularly from computational aspects. Biology is, of course you’ve got it by now, an important branch of applied biochemistry.
Thirdly, and perhaps back on more solid ground for most, there is certainly a lot of interest in biotechnology, and that does have its impact. However, I think you should be careful about writing off the contribution of physics, over the last 50 years, and also over the last 20 years. Consider, for example, developments of the transistor (the first practical implementation being 58 years ago). Also, consider semiconductor physics, the basis of integrated circuits in all computer chips and all that goes with them. Next consider TV, radio, radar and mobile phones. There have been significant advances in modulation technology, antennae and understanding of propagation. Now moving outside my particular expertise, there has been vast progress in material science (also physics, and chemistry too). This has impacted on transport (car, train and air). The latest I hear is that there are now European trains using magnetic levitation, with the first now seriously suggested for the UK; this was big in the laboratory (Eric Laithwaite), when I was at Imperial in the first half of the 1970s. [For the avoidance of doubt, don’t go telling me that any branch of engineering owes nothing to the (branch of) science on which it is based.] Then we have medicine: NMR scanners (that’s nuclear magnetic resonance), microsurgery (based on mechanics and optics, both of which derive from physics and not any other branch of science). How about lasers (first working one was 47 years ago)? Rocketry? Space travel? Nuclear accelerators (used for radiology)? Nuclear power; 49 years since the first commercial UK one, which was the second in the world? The the hydrogen bomb (first tested in 53 years ago, with significant developments since then)? It strikes me that there is a lot, through new technology and through advances and widespread uptake.
I’m not totally sure about the ranking of commercial opportunities; certainly pharmaceuticals is big. However, computers, mobile phones, brown goods, air travel, materials, etc are also very big.
Now, has physics contributed zilch of importance over the last half century?
Best regards
Unfortunately, for all the advances in computer technology, we have yet to solve a two electron system exactly, getting the exact eigenvalues and energies.
Sigh and curses.
There is a very simple reason for the decline of Physics (and Physics-dependent subjects such as engineering) in this country. Career prospects are poor.
Physicists and electronics graduates, for examples, have graduate unemployment rates of over 10% vs around 6% on average for all types of graduates.
The reason is that they largely rely on industry for employment – industry which has declined hugely under the present government that makes it harder and harder to compete internationally.
HJHJ, Career prospects are poor indeed. Personally, I blame the Russians – and Lord King. The rooskies failed to perpetuate the cold war and so made the collider research industry irrelevant, see my previous comment, and lord King failed to sell the nuclear power industry when it was ‘privatised’. The resulting collapse in demand sent a lot of good brains spinning off into IT, etc. Not me though, being mediocre I was already there. As a side bar, I wasn’t mediocre anymore in IT where the trained ones can be pretty ho-hum in the brains department. Case in point: games. If computer games are IT (and imo they are) and 16-year olds can be stellar programmers of games and make a lot of money at it, then who gives a flying you know what about training?
I have never met anybody who regards the possession of a science degree as ‘low brow’, and I rather suspect that S.G.Forrester has never met one either.
What he means I suppose is that somebody who is very familiar with the greatest achievements of Western physics, but who knows nothing about the greatest achievements of Western literature, is less educated – in the richest* sense of that term – than somebody who is very familiar with the greatest achievements of Western literature, but knows nothing about physics; a view which everybody (except perhaps the sort of physicist who thinks that all science reduces to physics) could agree.
*Where education is more than simply the acquisition of specialised technical skills.
I expect it’s because we highly subtle, rational and civilized modern linguists cannot tolerate the bear-pits that are today’s schools; I at least finished a period of supply teaching declaring I’d rather scrub floors for a living.
Possibly it would be of interest to compare the numbers qualified to teach shortage subjects with the numbers actually teaching them.
If truly there is a shortage of those wishing to study modern European languages beyond ordering the vin rouge, that would be not because British youf don’t want to read Racine, Dante or Goethe, not even because they don’t want to work in a Parisian brothel, but because a knowledge of formal grammar is required and they haven’t got one. They can’t parse a sentence in English, let alone Italian. Between the goon-food of GCSE and native-speaker fluency is a stage where you may need to work out the meaning of what you are reading and you do that by identifying what function the words are performing: subject, verb, object….How are members of a generation who wouldn’t recognize a subjunctive or a dative if kicked in the face by it supposed to become fluent linguists? Ms Kelly, please advise.
@Chris Goodman: Western physics? Literature, I agree, has definition in terms of its host culture. Surely physics and other physical sciences are rather less constrained, largely through being invariant throughout the universe (or at least we think so, having no evidence to the contrary).
Also, Chris’s “educated” versus “less educated – in the richest* sense of that term” strikes me as differing only in the words from S.G. Forrester’s “educated” versus “lowbrow”. The meaning is the same, or different perhaps only in the mind of someone who judges themselves “more richly educated”.
But that’s just a matter of opinion, as is “a view which everybody (except perhaps the sort of physicist who thinks that all science reduces to physics) could agree”.
Of course, someone whose grasp of science is expressed as “simply the acquisition of specialised technical skills”, and denies its interconnected universality, would not recognise “scientific education” if it slapped them in the face.
That is unless “everyone would agree” that the current human condition (over that of say historical Greek or Roman civilisations) arises from literature written since then, rather than increase in and acceptance of scientific knowledge, and exploitation of same through engineering, medicine and other technological works.
Well, now I must switch back to my normal position of distaste of using even a slight mix of argumentum ad hominem – and do some physics. Will I be using more or less of my education (or is that training) as a consequence?
Best regards
If you are unaware of the fact that the contents of your undergraduate physics textbook is a product of the intellectual culture of the West then you are more uneducated than I thought!
A ‘lowbrow’ [i.e. a person who takes no pleasure in intellectual challenges] is clearly not the same as somebody who is only interested in physics. Unless of course physics is not an intellectual pursuit; but then why make such an absurd assumption?
As for the reason why scientific disciplines do not all reduce to physics, I could explain why this is the case, but first you would have to explain to me why I should bother?
Ysabel Howard – I am sure the glorious Ruth Kelly is texting in her response to you right now.
@Chris Goodman
I am aware that my text books were written in English. I need more persuading that there was no substantially equivalent understanding of physics in Persia, Egypt, India, China, Japan, Mongolia, Asian Russia etc until the West taught them.
There is also the issue that the physics was there, waiting to be understood, before the arrival of any sentient lifeforms, let alone Western civilisation. Clearly the same cannot be said of literature.
On your second point, I do see (and saw) in your words, the claim that knowledge of the greatest achievements of Western literature represented “richer education” than knowledge of the greatest achievements of science: hence the latter is a “less intellectual pursuit” rather than “not an intellectual pursuit”. On that interpretation, I continue to disagree.
However, you implied strongly that science is “simply the acquisition of specialised technical skills” (with which I disagree); also that such simple acquisition etc is less than education (with which I have some sympathy). You were perhaps thinking of technicians.
Finally, I think you should bother to explain why scientific disciplines do not all reduce to physics. Or rather what I actually argued: which is the detailed operation of each science is dependent on a appropriate more fundamental science, with physics being the most fundamental (and therefore not so dependent).
As to reasons, I’m interested to see whether you can do it. If you succeed I will have been educated a little further, and that cannot be a bad thing. Also, this is a public discussion and others might be interested too.
Best regards
Two points:
Nigel: from what I understand of quantum mechanics – which admittedly is only what I can glean from the various science books which have become so popular in the last decade – when you get to the more fundamental questions of physics, it all begins to resemble philosophy surprisingly closely.
As Aristotle noticed some time ago.
On a completely unrelated point, I wonder why we fetishise “modern” languages. Surely ancient Asian languages, such as Japanese, would form a more interesting challenge, would be more useful, and would introduce little-Europeans to Asia’s cultural achievements. As it is, we encourage people to cram these various Indo-European languages which can introduce us to the cultural and economic vibrancy of . . . the European Union. Why would anyone want to put loads of effort into learning what are in the main merely dialects of the common Indo-European ur-language. (And anyway, Europe’s principal cultural artefacts are buildings and music).
Michael-Actually, it doesn’t really resemble philosophy very much except for some of the thinking modes required to arrive at certain conclusions. And much unlike philosophy(which relies on speculative and hypothetical thought), the various physics theories still ask for, and require, actual experimental data to support them, rather than being pure thought exercises.
Granted, as theories surpass our ability to carry out experiments to verify them(case in point: Higgs particle), higher order physics become similar to philosophy simply because we’re unable to verify them, and so fall back to speculative/hypothetical thought to justify them.
Nigel
Please don’t apologise for being argumentative – otherwise i would spend my life apologising.
I defer to your far superior knowledge of physics (my training was in biochemistry) but my point was not to imply that physics has stagnated for fifty years but that the recent advances made in biotechnology (from the discovery of the double helix to gene sequencing to gene splicing) are biochemistry’s Einstein moment.
Finding a cure for cancer, AIDS or preventing inherited disease is also more appealing to students entering the subject.
@Michael Taylor
I’m not actually certain what point you are making on fundamental questions of physics and on philosophy. However, I will try and give an answer, even if it is not to the question you asked.
I (like most scientists I know) adhere to the view that all science is “just” theory that works in practice.
“Works” means that it explains the phenomena that we have seen and that it allows us to predict one or more phenomena correctly, that are not correctly predicted by other competing scientific theories.
Thus there are no scientific “facts” concerning theories. There is, however, scientific evidence – and one can view such evidence as fact, if one wishes.
A valid scientific theory is one that has not been refuted by evidence, and where suitably diligent search has been made for such refutive evidence.
I recollect that this view is down to Karl Popper, but I’m not an expert on philosophy and would be quite content to be corrected.
As an example, consider Newton’s “Laws of Motion”, which form the basis of classical mechanics. They were fully accepted and worked very well on everything, until experiments extended to the very fast (where special relativity works better), and the very small (where quantum mechanics works better). Then Newton’s Laws failed to predict correctly the operation of those bits of the universe (and other failures came later).
Newton’s Laws continue to be accepted, though as approximations of some greater theory: such approximations applying so accurately within the defined limits, that the physics within those limits remains, effectively, unchanged.
Now for the link to philosophy, such as I can manage.
Newton’s Laws perhaps seem to us (the common people) entirely certain; even obvious. Thus they are called laws and accepted as facts.
Quantum mechanics does not seem so obvious. Actually it seems pretty weird. Thus we, the common people, view quantum theory as a theory, not a set of scientific laws. I suspect we really view it as horrible, and hope it will go away and be replaced by something we understand more easily.
However, in essence, quantum theory and Newton’s Laws are both the same, in that they are models of the physical world (expressed most precisely through mathematical formulae) that explain and predict, within the bounds over which we accept they explain and predict.
That’s philosophy.
I’m not certain I’m right on this. But it’s what I believe at the moment. All the evidence I acknowledge having seen does not, to my mind, refute this view. Therefore I believe it (as a sort of fact).
In addition, sometimes the theory has elegance or beauty. Scientists love that, just as most of us love the elegance or beauty of certain music or literature.
Best regards
@pommygranate, who wrote: “but my point was … that the recent advances made in biotechnology (…) are biochemistry’s Einstein moment.”
I too defer, to your superiour knowledge of biochemistry.
In other words: accepted.
Best regards
In terms of economic theory and fact, the labour market is not a free market at all, and is very different to other markets for goods and services. Its worth remembering that. I could list lots of facts from text books but won’t bother with that right now. Labour markets are very imperfect, and rely on lots of incomplete information and proxy signals of competencies, skills, etc. And then the investment in human capital is retained with the worker rather than the employer too.
This makes things damn complicated.
Also I think that the public education system was originally set up in response to market failure. That is, the failure of the market to provide a basic education. Basic levels of education fundamentally improve a nations productivity levels and potential for expanding output and efficiency of production.
Of course, that was over 100 years ago. The market now may be able to provide education.
The big problem as far as I see it is that the education system is poor at providing to what the market wants. Despite many attempts to address this, many institutions remain clueless. Now the answer might be the market or privatisation. Then again it might not.
My personal opinion is that some part-privatisation of further and higher education would be good, and creating the right incentives for educational institutions would be great.
Physics’ next Einstein moment? When they succeed in replacing the Standard Model with a definitive GUT. HAH!
“However, in essence, quantum theory and Newton’s Laws are both the same, in that they are models of the physical world (expressed most precisely through mathematical formulae) that explain and predict, within the bounds over which we accept they explain and predict.
That’s philosophy.”
I don’t think that’s really philosophy. Perhaps philosophy in the sense of reasoning and logic(logos), but what field of knowledge doesn’t employ those?
I always thought of philosophy as a subject distinct from science as due to not requiring ‘evidence’ nor the important criteria of falsifiability.
The link between quantum mechanics(particle level) and Newton’s Laws(bulk matter) can be explained mathematically too. In many ways, Newton’s Laws could be regarded as a subset of quantum mechanical behavior, linked by the correspondence principle.
Anyway, you’re right in saying that non-physicists think quantum mechanics is horrible… there were only four people in my class in the university module for quantum chemistry, out of six hundred people who were eligible for the module.
There’s always been a slight hierachy in science, with mathematics at the top, followed by physics, then chemistry, and finally biology at the bottom. I’ve found that it’s often easier for people at a certain level of the hierachy to understand what’s going on at the next lower level than vice versa.
Perhaps somebody can inquire about the number of mathematics graduates in the UK? I suspect there’s also been a significant drop.
Let us start from what we can agree upon. You agree that becoming ‘educated’ [in its richest sense] is something more than acquiring technical skills [although it generally relies upon them] but object to physics being described as a collection of ‘technical skills’ on the grounds that a physicist is not a technician. Indeed what you actually said was that
“someone whose grasp of science is expressed as “simply the acquisition of specialised technical skills”, and denies its interconnected universality, would not recognise “scientific education” if it slapped them in the face”
which is all well and good, but since I nowhere claimed that physics supplies us with nothing more than a collection of specialised technical skills it is irrelevant.
Like most people – it is hardly controversial – I would argue that a fairly detailed knowledge of science, in the ‘current human condition’ as you put it, is an important part of what it means to be educated.
I would even go so far as to assert that an ‘educated person’ ought to have some knowledge of quantum electrodynamics.
The issue was whether or not a detailed knowledge of Western physics is equivalent [with reference to the question of being an ‘educated person’] to, for example, a detailed knowledge of Western literature.
Well your ignorance of the Western origins of modern science supplies an answer of sorts. An educated person would know something about the context within which modern science operates, and by that I do not simply means its metaphysical assumptions but also the historical context within which arose; although I am not sure [indeed it is very doubtful] that it is necessary to be educated in this more general sense in order to be a good scientist.
In short [to put it in the starkest terms possible] knowledge of what it is to be a human being is much better served by Shakespeare than it is by Newton – although [it is tiresome to have to repeat this] knowledge of Newton [i.e. the approach to the world that is supplied by classical physics] is ALSO an important part of what it is to be educated.
Which brings me to your challenge that since this is a public discussion and people may be interested I ought to seek to explain why scientific disciplines do not all reduce to physics – or as you put it in your response to pommygranate
‘all science derives from physics. Chemistry is “just” a rather important branch of applied quantum electrodynamics’…Biology is, of course you’ve got it by now, an important branch of applied biochemistry.’
This is an example of what late great Stephen Jay Kline in ‘Conceptual Foundations For Multi-Disciplinary Thinking’ [Stanford 1995] founder of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University described as a disciplinary overclaim:
“We now need to discuss this argument, since some physicists repeatedly use it in attempts to justify quantum mechanics as a worldview. They argue that quantum mechanics, when aggregated for larger systems, reproduces classical mechanics and theremodynamics, and therefore can be taken as the basis for more complex systems. There are three problems with this counterargument. First, the fact that a lower level aggregates to a higher level does not make the variables, the parameters, the behaviours, or even the “rules” in the operating space of the two levels the same. Indeed, in most cases, all these matters differ from one level to another in the hierarchy of constitution. We do not expect a mob to act like an individual, even though individuals aggregate to a mob. Organisms are made up of cells, but the behaviour of cells are not those of humans, and so on. Second, any assertion that all humans need to know can be found from a theory about inert subatomic particles assumes implicitly that no emergent properties arise from: heterogeneity; feedback loops; or the nature of hierarchical systems with interfaces of mutual constraint. However, vast amounts of barefoot data show that each of these three kinds of structure in a system can by itself create an enormous array of emergent properties in both inert human design and living systems.’ Kline (1995) pp.221-2.
I offer this brief quote as something you may which to contemplate. It has taken me nearly an hour to type this – so please excuse me from the task of explaining it further. This is after all the comments section of blog with an article of a quite different topic!
“…non-physicists think quantum mechanics is horrible…”
Well, fine. I happen to think all that squishy shit is horrible. Viva statistical mechanics!
But Timmah, remember, you and me and Nigel… we’re heavily outnumbered! Among normal people, we’re the freaks!
@Chris Goodman
Thank you for the hour’s effort. It does make interesting reading. Though I must admit that we are still far from being totally in agreement.
However, I will leave you with the last word on the topic, at least for this set of comments, as I think we have delighted everyone long enough.
Best regards
Darn, I was enjoying this little off-topic diversion.
Nigel and the Wobbly Guy,
It’s interesting: you’ve both taken time and trouble to lay out your views of scientific method and speculation. And reading them through, the similarities between this and current thought-modes in (at any rate) Western analytical philosophy are striking. Nigel, I can remember (with some embarrassment still) my philosophy tutor turning to me exasperatedly and saying : “Look, facts are just lying around out there on the floor, you know” – his point being that they can be understood only in the framework of a wider theory of truth, perception and meaning.
As for hypothesis and speculation in philosophical thought. I can assure you that these are probably the worst, most damaging professional insults which angry philosophers throw at each other when they’ve run out of arguments. Vast tracts of philosophical literature are devoted to philosophers pursuing vendattas against their enemies by hunting down circularities, non-sequitors, false analogies, and logical falsehoods. I seriously doubt that standards of logical rigour are lower in philosophy than they are in the higher end of physics. In the end, though, philosophy and physics gravitate towards the spectrum of thought and experience which defy answers.
I think philosophers recognise this perhaps more readily than physicists. Consider, for example, the resources already wasted by physicists on “artificial intelligence” projects – resources which could have been saved if the physicists had consulted philosophers.
And conversely, yes, consider how much time could have been saved if philosophers had the humility to keep up with the physicists. It was Hegel, I think, who “proved” to his own satisfaction that there could only be six planets. . ..