c - How Do You Fight Sociology?

In this last part of the book, I want to return to the question I raised in the Introduction. Why, despite so much effort by thousands of the most talented and well-trained scientists, has fundamental physics made so little definitive progress in the last twenty-five years? And given there are promising new directions, what can we do to ensure that the rate of progress is restored to what it was for two centuries before 1980?

One way to describe the trouble with physics is to say that there is no work in theoretical physics over the last three decades that is a sure bet for the Nobel Prize. The reason is that a condition for the prize is that the advance has been checked by experiment. Of course, ideas such assupersymmetry or inflation may be shown by experiment to be true, and if they are, their inventors will deserve the Nobel Prize. But we cannot now say that a discovery of any hypothesis about physics beyond the standard model is assured.

In our attempts to unbiased evaluations of our peers' work, we professors tend almost reflexively to reward those who agree with us and penalize those who disagree. Even when we rise above academic politics, we often fall into the trap of evaluating fellow scientists on the basis of one-dimensional characterizations. In faculty meetings and and informal discussions, we talk about who is "good" and who is not, as we really knew what we meant. Can a person's life work be reduced to "Angela is not as good as Chris"? It often seems as though achievements requiring nothing more than cleverness and hard work are valued more highly than probing thought or imagination. Intellectual fads are too important, and people who ignore them have dicey academic careeers.

I once worked on a project with a retired general who had headed a college for military officers and then become a business consultant. He talked about his frustrations in trying to work with universities. I asked him what he perceived the problem to be. He said. "There is a simple but essential thing we try to teach every Marine officer, that no university administrator I've met seems to know: There is a big difference between management and leadership. You can manage the procurement of supplies, but you musy lead soldiers into battle." I agree with him. In my time in universities, I've seen much more management than leadership.

Subrahamanyan Chandrasekhar, perhaps the greatest astrophysisist in the twentieth century, loved to tell a story of a visit to Princeton in the mid 1980s, where he was feted in honor of his recent Nobel Prize. At the dinner, he found himself seated next to an earnest young man. As physicists often do to make conversations, he asked his dinner companion:"What are you working on these days?" The reply was, #I work on string theory, which is the most important advance in physics in this century." The young string theorist went on to advice Chandra to drop what he was doing and switch to string theory or risk becoming as obsolete as as those in the 1920s who did not immediately take up quantum theory.

"Young man", Chandra replied, "I knew Werner Heisenberg. I can promise you that Heisenberg would never have been so rude as to tell someone to stop what they were doing and work on quantum mechanics. And he certainly would never have been so disrespectful as to tell someone who got his PhD fifty years ago that he was about to become obsolete."

Let me summarize, so we can see where this is taking us. The discussion has brought seven unusual aspects of the string theory community:

1. Tremendous self-confindence, leading to a sense of entitlement of belonging to an elite community of experts.

2. An unusually monolithic community, with a strong sense of consensus, whether driven by the evidence or not, and an unusual uniformity of views on open questions. These views seem related to the existence of a hierarchical structure in which the ideas of a few leaders dictate the viewpoints, strategy, and direction of the field.

3. In some cases, a sense of identification with the group, akin to identification with a religious faith or a political platform.

4. Astrong sense of the boundary between the group and other experts.

5. A disregard for and disinterest in the ideas, opinions, and work of experts who are not part of the group, and a preference for talking only with other members of the community.

6. Atendency to interpret evidence optimistically, to believe exaggerated or incorrect statements of results, and to disregard the possibility that the theory might be wrong. This is coupled with a tendency to believe results are true because they are "widely believed," even if no one has not checked (or even seen) the proof oneself.

7. A lack of aoppreciation for the extent to which a research program ought to involve risk.

It turns out that sociologists have no problem recognizing this phenomenon. It afflicts communities of highly credential experts, who by choice of circumstance communicate only among themselves. It has been studied in the context of intellgence agencies and governmental policy-making bodies and major corporations.Because the consequences have sometimes been tragic, there is literature describing the phenomenon, which is sometimes called groupthink.

Yale psychologist Irving Janis, who coined the term in the 1970s, defines groupthink as "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." According to this definition, groupthink occurs only when cohesiveness is high. It requires that members share a strong "we-feeling" of solidarity and a desire to maintain relationships within the group at all costs. When colleagues operate in a groupthink mode, they automatically apply the "preserve group harmony" test to every decision they face.

Janis was studying failures of decision making by groups of experts, such as Bay of Pigs. The term has since been applied to many other examples, including the failure of NASA to prevent the Challenger disaster, the failure of the West to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union, the failure of American automobile companies to foresee the demand for smaller cars, and more recently — and perhaps most calamitously — the Bush administration's rush to war on the basis of a false belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

here's a description of groupthink excerpted from an Oregon State University Web site dealing with communication:

Groupthink members see themselves as part of an in-group working against an outgroup opposed to their goals. You can tell if a group suffers from groupthink if it:

1. overestimates its invulnerability or high moral stance,

2. collectively rationalizes the decisions it makes,

3. demonizes or stereotypes outgroups and their leaders,

4. has a culture of uniformity where individuals censor themselves and others so that the facade of group unanimty is maintained, and

5. contains members who take it upon themselves to protect the group leader by keeping information, theirs or other group members', from the leader.

This does not match up one-to-one with my characteristization of the culture of string theory, but it's close enough to be worrying.