Kepler and Newton (Systematics or Singularity)

"This world is unfair" .... Maybe yes.

When you see low-quality papers in highly prestigeous scientific journals, this might be your assessment of the reality. (hope you agree.)

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I came back from Manchster, where this year's IOP meeting for nuclear physics was held. On the second day, the conference dinner was organised. I joined the table with a few relatively young academics and had a talk about many things. But particularly, we eagerly debated about the way to carry out physics research. They all have experimental backgrounds and it was only me who was a theoretician. But the point was in common, that is, whether we should focus on systematics or one singular event contaning new physics. The guy from France said that systematic survey is important and most of the research should be spent on the systematics. Another guy from Scotland (i.e., Britain) said we should focus on one particular event containing very new and interesting physics. And I, from Japan, said that the one single event should be studied after looking at the systematics. What I mean, is that the systematics should not be the purpose, but it should be a way to reach or find out the singular events with good and new physics.

Then, we talked about Kepler and Newton. Well, more precisely, we should add Tycho Brahe, the supervisor of Kepler. Tycho spent his entire professional life on the systematic study of the motion of stars, particularly, planets. He left the enormous amount of data collected for many decades. and passed on to Kepler. He then analysed this systematics and found three laws. After 70-80 years, Newton explained the laws with mathematics.

Kepler's work is, needless to say, the work of genius. It is extremely non-trivial to dig out a very small treasure stone (the three laws) embedded by an innumerable numbers of sands and dirty stones (Tycho's data). It is further non-trivial to explain the three laws by a single principle in the name of the theory of gravity. So, Newton is a genius of geniuses. On the contrary, it is obviuos that Tyco's work is nothing but the systematics, which is tedious, boring and painstaking (at least to me). Probably, from the modern standard, this kind of work should be avoided because we can not earn many numbers in pubilcation. However, it is certain that without the work, Kepler and Newton could have nothing to study in the motion of planets.

Darwin said in his famous book, "The origin of Spieces", that we should not forget that every species currently occupying the Earth is the result of so-many deaths and failures of extinct fauna and flora. This means that we are just tree leaves on the top of a thick forest, and below us, there are tremendous number of dead branches and fallen leaves. But without them we could not sit here and see the world.

It is interesting to observe that even today, the styles of scientific studies rarely change: the French and German prefer the systematic studies while the British try to find a special event. Well, History is continuous and rarely faces a phase transition, perphaps.

Nuclear physics and Condensed matter physics

I have a visitor from Japan now. He got his PhD degree for his work on physics of metallic clusters as an application of nuclear structure theory. Now he is a post-doc in a Japanese university and studying structure of fullerens with the density functional theory. To many nuclear physicists, solid-state or condensed-matter physicists are a kind of the target of envy: they are richer, have more opportunities, and easier access to publicaions in Phys. Rev. Lett, Nature and Sciences (meaning more publications in these highly prestigeous journals). Of course, some of these things can be purely an imagination by nuclear physicists....

Listening to the inside-stories from the visitor, the condensed matter physics community is not such the Garden of Eden. It is more like a nuclear system consisting of independent particles. That is, the subjects they are interested in are so various and huge that they pay little attention to others' works...Yes, very little interaction between researchers... This comment by the visitor reminded me of my experience in an anuual meeting of the Japanese Physical Society (JPS) about a year ago when I first attended to the session of the condensed matter physics.

There were many presentations and a great number of audience came to listen. But after each presentation few questions were given. It seemed nobody was in the room. To me, the situtation was comfortable for asking my naive questions, such as "Is the GP equation really able to reproduce high-spin states with vortices?" The answers to my questions from the speakers were not so sound as an expert. Instead of giving a good reply reminding the audience of a fact that the questioner (that is, myself) is stupid enough to ask this kind of question, with a deep insight and wide range of knowledge in their physics, it seemed to me that they tried to escape from my "accusation" as soon as possible by saying something confusing me. As a matter of fact, I was a little dissapointed at their responses. The chairman was Professor Ueda, who is well-known for his works on the Bose-Einstein Condensation, and probably knew how to deal with this kind of naive and stupid questions, but he did say very little in order to help their students in the presentation stage, for unknown reasons. Probably, I was stupid enough that he wanted to finish the session as soon as he could and to go to lunch....I don't know.

I then went to the high-energy physics (Hadron Physics) session. I expected more than the condensed matter physics session, but surprisingly the atomosphere was very similar to the previous one. Of course, in comparison to the condensed-matter physics community, the number of the audience in the hadronic physics session is much smaller, but I guess more than 50 people fullhoused the room. Dr. Fukushima from MIT gave an invited talk in the begining, but the reaction fro the audience was not so good. I strongly believe that many of them could not follow what he talked about although I thought his presentation was well-prepared and good-structured so as to make even novices understand to some extent. Again, I was dissappointed a little.

Back in Nuclear Structure Session, surprisingly the atomosphere was very different from the last two sessions. The participants asked many questions and the chairman sometimes had to stop the arguments. The reason was obvious. In contrast to the previous two physics communities, there are more seniour academics taking place in the session at the nuclear structure division. Therefore, the audience well understood the contents spoken by the talkers and they could easily evaluate the value of the talks.

I learned that even inside physics there are very many different worlds. If I went to the sessions such as the material sciences or semi-coductor physics, where the communities are tightly bound to the industry, the atomosphere would be totally different from the others...