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Re: who really "knows his/her stuff"?



Joe Heafner has "unleashed a can of worms".

I agree with two major points of his rant. (The third
point, about music careers, was pretty much off-the-wall.)

There is something fundamentally inconsistent about the
various meanings attributed to the PhD.
1) I was always told that the PhD was "the research
degree". The grad-school admissions committee admits
students on that basis. The degree requirements are
constructed on that basis.
2) In contrast, the faculty search/hiring committees
(and others) seem to think that the PhD is the basic
credential for teaching undergrads.

Multiple lines of evidence suggest these two notions are
not equivalent. For starters, check out the latest issue
of Phys Rev Letters
http://ojps.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PRLTAO&Volume=92&Issue=2
and compare it with the topics that have been discussed on
this list in recent months and years.
http://lists.nau.edu/archives/phys-l.html
I think you will find not much overlap. From this I surmise
that the "hot topics" for teachers are not the "hot topics"
for researchers.

The fact is, at most of the schools that grant PhDs, most of
their students do not go on to have research careers. This
is a fine thing if you ask me. Training in physics imparts a
lot of skills and a "physics culture" i.e. a certain way of
looking at things which is an excellent foundation for a wide
variety of careers (especially if coupled with some "cross
training" in how to recognize and attack problems for which
the physics approach is not suitable).

... why not give ... a fair shot at the high glorious honor of
earning the magic letters so they will be considered human?

Yeah. IMHO any university that requires an "oath of allegiance"
to a physics research career as a prerequisite for admission to
grad school is selling short their school and their field.

======

The second point, as we have discussed before: Yes, a lot of schools
engage in false advertising when they imply that (a) having big-shot
researchers on the faculty translates into (b) high-quality undergrad
teaching. Finding (a) and (b) together seems to be the exception
rather than the rule.

=============================================

Random tangentially-related musings: Law schools award the JD
(Juris Doctor), not the PhD. Similarly med schools award the MD,
not the PhD. The PhD is the research degree, whereas JD and MD
are what you might call "practical" degrees, qualifying you to
practice the profession. If you want to do research, you might
be better off getting a PhD in physiology rather than (or in
addition to) an MD.

Could there be a "practical" doctorate in physics, alternative
to the PhD? Is such a thing desirable? Is such a thing even
possible? Is it possible to acquire real "physics culture"
except via the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of doing real
research? (Sure, it can happen in exceptional cases, e.g.
Ramanujan-type geniuses who develop outside the "system", but
does it make sense for the other 99.9999% of the doctor-wannabes?)

I guess it's a two-edged sword: There's a wide variety of stuff
I consider "doing physics" that is not "physics research" ... but
precisely because it is so widely-varied and ill-characterised
you might have a hard time convincing people to trust it as a
vehicle for training physicists.