When I signed up for studying at the university, I thought being a physicist was my dream job.
But here I am, on YouTube.
How did that happen?
I think I owe you an explanation.
When I started studying at the university my expectations were based on biographies
of scientists.
They wrote a lot of letters to each other; they went to conferences.
They were thinkers and tinkerers and had sometimes heated but usually respectful arguments.
This is what I expected.
Yes, that was hopelessly naïve, I know I know.
But.
In my defense.
I don’t come from an academic background.
I come from a family of teachers and accountants and post office workers.
They’re normal people.
I did an internship in the chemical industry and another one at a bank, gleefully stamping
transfer slips.
I just didn’t know anyone with a PhD.
And those were the early 1990s.
You couldn’t just ask the internet and within a day you have 2000 people giving you advice,
and some marriage proposals along with that.
The first years at university were glorious.
Because for the first time in my life I was in the company of other people who were like
me.
At school I had always been the weird one for actually being interested in science and
maths.
But at the university everyone was like that.
We talked about everything from maths to philosophy, physics and politics.
And yes, alcohol was involved.
It was a really good time.
And that was all very nice, except I was getting older and still didn’t have a decent job.
I made a little money by selling oil paintings, those were the days people, but I didn’t
seriously think I was a particularly good artist.
I really had to get a normally job and stop asking my grandma to help out with paying
rent.
I thought that the institute of physics would give me a job when I’d finished my masters
degree with good grades.
Though technically at the time that was called a diploma.
I thought they’d give me a job that because that had worked for all the other students
previously.
If your grades were good, they’d offer you a job as a graduate student.
It wasn’t particularly great pay, but it was a real job.
And that’s where things started to go wrong.
Because I finished my exams with excellent grades.
I don’t mean to brag, but I think you need this context.
But I wasn’t offered a job because I’m a woman.
I’m not guessing that that’s what happened, I know, because they told me.
You see, the guy who was head of the institute told me that, since I’m female I should
apply for a scholarship that was exclusively for women in the natural sciences.
Because then the institute wouldn’t have to pay for me.
Makes sense, doesn’t it.
So, well, I applied for the scholarship and got it, alright.
But these scholarships don’t come with any benefits like pension savings and health insurance.
I know this sounds very German, but these things matter to us.
Also, I was now reminded on various occasions that I wasn’t actually employed at the institute.
I was just there because I had this scholarship for women.
And that was totally true.
This by the way is why I am against programs or positions that are exclusively for women.
I think that treating women differently just reinforces the prejudice that women are less
capable than men.
But I digress.
Alright, you might say, stop whining, at least I did have an income now.
Yes, so far so good.
At this time I was the only woman at the institute, except for the administration.
But the next problem was that the head of the institute made a lot of money with selling
textbooks.
He wrote very little of these textbooks himself.
Rather, he gave assignments for parts of the books to students and postdocs.
Which is why, in case you’ve ever wondered, these textbooks are so discontinuous and partly
repetitive.
He expected me to also work for him, to which I said “no”.
I was then ordered into his office, in which he gave me a very angry speech, according
to which I was not “loyal” to all the other students who did their part.
I told him that I was under no obligation to work for him and didn’t care what the
rest of the students were thinking.
He got angry, I laughed at him, he started shouting that I was fired and physically shoved
me out of his office.
True story.
The irony is that he couldn’t fire me because, if you remember, he had refused to hire me
in the first place.
I was paid by that scholarship for women and that wasn’t managed by the institute but
by the office of the university president.
I’m not just telling you this because it’s entertaining, it was also a rather rude awakening.
It made me realize that this institute wasn’t about knowledge discovery.
It was about money making.
And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn’t just this particular
institute and this particular professor.
It was generally the case.
The moment you put people into big institutions the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to
money making.
Here’s how this works.
If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, then the institution gets part of that
money.
It’s called the “overhead”.
Technically that’s meant to pay for offices and equipment and admin etc.
But academic institutions then part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to
keep that overhead coming.
Small scholarships don’t make much money, but research grants can be tens of millions
of dollars.
And the overhead can be anything between 15 and 50 percent.
This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant
money.
And partly they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants
to get paid themselves.
While the administrators who are paid on the overhead usually have permanent positions.
But you get used to this kind of crap.
And the overhead isn’t even the real problem.
The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to
produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.
That’s how academia works.
Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grand holder.
And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants.
The result is a paper production machine, in which students and postdocs are burnt through
to bring in money for the institution.
Most of that money comes from your taxes.
After my PhD, I applied for another scholarship and got that and then I got a postdoc job
and a grant and another job and another job and another grant, and so on.
And I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or get hired.
You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream.
You want them to be a little bit edgy.
But not too edgy, noo.
it needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery.
And since most grants are 3 years or 5 years at most, it also needs to be something that
can be wrapped up quickly.
The more I saw of this, the more I realized this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life.
The other thing that happened was that the more I saw of the foundations of physics,
the more I became convinced that most of the research there wasn’t based on sound scientific
principles.
I know this sounds wild, like I’m the crank next door on YouTube.
And maybe that’s what I am.
But I like to think that my argument was and still is very academic.
I never intended it to be offensive.
I just explained why thinking up new particles isn’t a good strategy for progress in physics,
and why that had gotten an entire disciple stuck.
And naïve as I was, I expected physicists to think about it.
I expected rational debate.
But that never came.
No one was interested.
No one is interested.
They were interested in writing more papers.
And that’s what they need all these particles and other wild ideas for.
To write papers.
To get grants.
To get postdocs.
To write more papers.
And round and round it goes.
Meanwhile, I had moved half around the world because that’s standard for postdocs.
It’s just expected of you.
And at some point you just accept the constant moving as normal because the only people you
know also do it.
It’s incredibly hostile to personal life, detrimental to mental health, and women suffer
from it because our reproductive reality is that we need to start families earlier than
men.
By my mid-thirties, I had somehow miraculously managed to get married and have two children.
But I couldn’t find a job anywhere near my husband.
So for several years I commuted from Frankfurt to Stockholm.
And yes, those cities are actually in different countries.
After 5 years of my murder commute, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I constantly felt guilty for not working more and not spending more time with my kids.
My mental health was worse than ever, I was permanently stressed out, I had several nervous
breakdowns, I was constantly ill.
I decided I’d go back to Germany and not move out of country again, until the kids
were out of school.
Instead, I applied for research grants on projects that lasted one two or three years
and that could be located in Germany.
A lot of water has flown under the bridge since, so let me be honest.
At this point I’d figured out what you need to put into a grant proposal to get the money.
And that’s what I did.
I applied for grants on research projects because it was a way to make money, not because
I thought it would leave an impact in the history of science.
It’s not that was I did was somehow wrong.
It was, and still is, totally state of the art.
I did what I said I’d do in the proposal, I did the calculation, I wrote the paper,
I wrote my reports, and the reports were approved.
Normal academic procedure.
But I knew it was bullshit just as most of the work in that area is currently bullshit
and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit.
The real problem I had, I think, is that I was bad at lying to myself.
Of course, I’d try to tell myself and anyone who was willing to listen that at least unofficially
on the side I would do the research that I thought was worth my time but that I couldn’t
get money for because it was too far off the mainstream.
But that research never got done because I had to do the other stuff that I actually
got paid for.
Then COVID came and it reminded me how short life really is.
I pivoted, applied for funding on the research that I wanted to do, that I was rather afraid
wouldn’t get funded.
It didn’t get funded.
And so here we are, on YouTube.
Where I talk about why I love science and hate it at the same time.
This sounds like a sad story and in some sense it is.
Because it’s the story of a young scientist whose dream died.
And it’s the story of an old scientist who thinks they could have made a difference,
if it hadn’t been necessary to get past 5 reviewers who didn’t share my interests
because that’s what it comes down to eventually.
It’s not that they say there’s something wrong with your proposal.
It just doesn’t excite them because it’s not the main current interest.
My problem has always been that I just didn’t fit in.
But there’s a happy ending in that I’ve found you.
A community of people who share my interests.
Well, more or less, or why the heck have you not been watching my video on indefinite causal
structures.
It’s been quite a change to switch from academia to being self-employed.
I had to learn how to write invoices.
I had to register a business.
I have a tax consultant, two agents, and a twelve-person team that’s distributed over
half the world.
Very steep learning curve.
Mistakes were made.
But eventually, today, I feel good about it because unlike academic research, this is
an honest trade.
You get some of my knowledge.
I get some of your attention.
I like the simplicity of that.
And I am also heartened that there are so many people who care about obscure problems
in the foundations of physics.
Though I think you underestimate the relevance of indefinite causal structures.
So, that’s my story, no more and no less.
Please do not think that my experience with academia is universal or that I have claimed
it is.
I know many people who love academia the way it is and who think it’s working just fine.
I’m just not one of them.
Have never been, and I don’t think I’ll ever be.
I’m not sure if I’m going to post this video.
It’s a bit too much isn’t it.