Due to monopoly on waste disposal and recycling, mafia in Italy earns 16 billion euros a year. I however come from the other side of Adriatic sea where I am now considering the garbage industry as my preferred business. (Or holistic detective agency).
ZapperZ said:
People seem to be equating "applied" with "not fundamental".
When I was writing the graduation work (major) professors pushed me into that kind of dilemmas. Their criticism was that the allowed way of writing is sticking to the "fundamental" physics. Oddly, I wrote 150 pages about ice ages in a year without much consulting. I wanted to smuggle in the opportunity to read and write about chaos theory in fact. The crime instead was that we are not allowed to create works that are like books, textbooks or works that process complex issues. All "papers" must be narrow in topic. The solution was that I was allowed to write that topic as a part of Astronomy (aha! complex science). The only important content for discussion was Fourier analysis.
The culture of working with something defined as fundamental is well established matter in college. It persists through their own fierce talks and debates among the stuff, but more importantly I notice that the fundamental areas of physics provide a sense of simplicity and beauty. Empirical, complex and applied papers don't seem to match so well the enjoyment of younger students and professors - or maybe I have the wrong picture in my head.
Advanced papers are plentiful, hard, quote too many articles, they simply look bad and in continuation its hard to publish anything wider or much different on the new frontiers.
Condensed matter physics has arrived with steam and funds, as far as I know. Personally, I don't like that area. Quantum mechanics is generating too big and ugly complexity contained in theories of condensed matter. Also, people say that usually very few people work efficiently to become problem solvers.
At the time of learning the topic of ice ages, there were two questions I made. The wrong question is what moves the climate. Its wrong because if I take a look at the climate record I don't know if that record is like a recording-tape that was taped over with some small periodical influence on the climate. The good question is: what is it there on the climate record. In this way there is much less work to write about... At different scales of time and space different physical phenomena become important. Over some range then questions shift. In analogy I believe that it is the same shift when it comes to quality of education and how it can relate to business. Proclaim one question less important and another one better. If being a student would complicate matters more, the definition of physics and the choice of career would arrive more easily, I should say.
Cosmology still can not print out the final reasons why that ought to explain nature. The science still goes on, classes too. Academia would be reminded through learning cosmology that they aren't REALLY working with fundamental. Loving some topic, beauty, time, rationality are a major role although they back off due to social or partially economic availability.
I don't like the end of my college because it certifies we are all jackasses again just like before. I like the pleasurable sensation of working something inside the atmosphere of personal education. My conclusion is that studies should be complex and extend to surrounding activities. :-)
