Laura Hiscott speaks to physicists about their new year’s resolutions
The start of a new year is often as much about looking backwards as it is about trying to do better in the future. Perhaps that’s why I recently got side-tracked rifling through one of my old university undergraduate lab books after clearing out my belongings. As I flicked through the pages I found myself reminiscing about calculating Planck’s constant by measuring the spectra of filaments glowing at different temperatures, and investigating how an aluminium cylinder scatters radiation from caesium-137.
Nostalgia aside, I’m ashamed to say that I found more than one graph without a title, a table of measurements without units and generally incomprehensible scrawls alongside badly drawn diagrams of experimental set-ups. I recalled that, at the beginning of each new experiment, I resolved to keep my book neat and decipherable, but that never seemed to last long. I also remember vowing to approach each new practical as if I didn’t already know what the result should be, rather than tweaking the equipment until it yielded the right answer.
But, with 2022 upon us, my trip down memory lane got me wondering whether “proper” physicists, not just former students like myself, have transcended all bad practice, or whether they also have habits that they’re keen to kick in the new year. After asking a dozen or so scientists if they had any new year’s resolutions, I discovered that, yes, they are indeed human too. Not wishing to embarrass any of them, what follows is entirely anonymous but I’m sure you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement.
The responses featured a few recurring themes. Several people who regularly do programming told me they were determined to comment their code as they write it, rather than when they return to it months later and have no idea what they did. Even more people said that 2022 would be the year they keep up with their arXiv e-mails and read all the papers they save. Grammar and notation was another sore point, with one physicist resolving “to treat ‘data’ as plural” and another “to put decimal places on the line rather than floating, where they could be mistaken for a multiply symbol”.
I also learned that academics are as prone to procrastination as anyone else, even if they have different ways of putting off work. The time-sinks that they are determined to avoid next year include “searching for jobs in exotic locations on a bad day”, “lamenting how much more money I could be making as a banker or consultant” and “doing deep research to figure out who my paper’s referee is, instead of actually responding to the referee report”.
Now, while I always thought that researchers are supremely driven – since they are largely left to their own devices with few concrete deadlines – it turns out that some get creative about staying productive. One physicist told me that, as a graduate student, they had a resolution to miss fewer self-imposed research deadlines than the budget negotiations in US Congress. Game-ifying a task and making it a competition is a brilliant life hack.
That’s not to say that academics are not motivated by their passion for their subject. Indeed, some of them find it spilling over into every aspect of their life, with one researcher’s resolution being to stop subconsciously steering every conversation towards their field of research, regardless of who they’re talking to or how the discussion starts. Others, however, find that their intellectual curiosity applies a bit too broadly and can lead them astray; one physicist told me they’re resolving not to get into any heated debates about topics outside their field of expertise.
I’m also relieved to discover I’m not alone in still being puzzled by concepts from my student days. One researcher mentioned that they’d like to finally get their head around what a tensor is and I have a feeling there are other academics who might share this goal. I once had a lecturer who likened tensors to rattlesnakes – if you meet one, just turn round and walk the other way.
One physicist resolves to “try not to panic when someone assumes I understand quantum mechanics or general relativity”
Feeling like you don’t properly understand a subject is always worse if someone else expects you to, though. This was demonstrated by one physicist’s resolution to “try not to panic when someone assumes I understand quantum mechanics or general relativity, and to really try not to panic if another physicist assumes this”.
Perhaps it would help us if another academic who sent me their resolutions achieves them this year, given that one of their goals is “to convince the colleague who’s been teaching undergraduate quantum for the last 20 years to take a research leave (so that I can teach it from now on)”. Indeed, the backbiting and politics of university life might be the source of many more resolutions, with another physicist resolving “to get out of the awards committee – so that I can be nominated for a prize”.
So whether you’re aiming to reach new heights within academia or shed bad habits, rest assured you’re not alone. But of all the resolutions I came across, my personal favourite came from an astrophysics PhD student, and will make you laugh or groan, depending on your sense of humour: “I hope to achieve”, they said, “a new year’s resolution of less than one microarcsecond.” It’s a good job we have very long baseline interferometry.
Happy new year!