If you’ve ever taken a science class and worked alone, you might be fooled into thinking science could be done alone. In physics, in particular, nobody works alone. We generally group physicists into two groups: the theorists, and the experimentalists. The theorists are people like Einstein: they sit at a desk with pen and paper, conjure up “thought experiments,” and attempt to deduce new physical theories or predictions. Most physicists are not theorists, however. Most of us are experimentalists: we work in huge teams, sometimes dispersed across the entire planet, all working on the same project. For example, at CU Boulder we have many physics faculty they say they work at CERN, the particle collider in Geneva, Switzerland. They don’t actually do their work at the collider, but they work on data analysis and other experimental research. Their entire job is based on an experiment, in this case it would be various combinations of particle collisions.
If we just take a look at the people involved in the recent gravitational wave research at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory):
we can see that the community involved in this one experiment is tremendous! There are people from the U.S., U.K., Germany, Australia, Italy, and the Netherlands all involved in this experiment. If you take a look at other physics publications you’ll see that this sort of international nature of physics is commonplace. To sum things up, there’s no “I” in “physics.”
This all ties into what we might call an ecosystem. That is, there exists a network of institutions that facilitates the development of new physics. Physics research, as noted above, is performed in large, interconnected, international groups. The actual experiments are carried out at university laboratories or billion dollar technology companies like LIGO. Even in more local terms, there exist smaller ecosystems within a whole. In Colorado, for example, there is a company called LASP (atmospheric physics) in Boulder, which pays for physics bachelors to return to CU Boulder to get more advanced degrees. The scientific community has a sort of natural selection process at the level of publishing. For a physics research institution to perform progressive research they (usually) need incredibly expensive equipment, which requires funding, which requires a good research reputation, which requires published research… but to do the research they need the expensive equipment and funding in the first place, and round and round we go! For this reason, a research institution needs a wealthy donor to startup. Institutions like universities typically have massive government funding for physics programs. Institutions like technology companies typically require a billionaire or two to get the ball rolling. To make an analogy, it’s kind of like trying to get a credit card for the first time. The creditor tells you they don’t want to give you a credit card because you don’t have good credit. But you don’t have a credit card so how on earth are you supposed to get good credit?
All of these rhetorical categories are intimately linked. With a good team and appropriate, expensive equipment, a research institution can do good experiments and acquire good evidence. With good evidence, they can make good arguments, and present profitable information to a publisher.
Charles Golden 