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From time to time, I witnessed the shadows of depression, which I’ve read that others on the drug sometimes succumb to. Fortunately, I had the wherewithal to know this was a chemically induced darkness—one that reminded me of the sharp mood swings associated with Decadron, a corticosteroid once prescribed to me for a subdural hematoma resulting from a head injury. After two weeks of usage with this steroid, I felt suicidal. My physician had not warned me of this side effect. But with Adderall, I had knowledge aplenty and knew that once I stopped it, my depression would quickly lift. I also know that not everyone has that kind of previous experience or perspective, which is when folks get into deep trouble.

We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.

I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

first direct images of

magnetic monopoles

Image representing 12 micrometer x 12 micrometer of artificial magnetic metamaterial where monopoles can be seen at each end of the Dirac strings, visible as dark lines. The dark regions correspond to magnetic islands where the magnetization is reversed. (Image courtesy of Paul Scherrer Institute)

Innovative technology and marketing strategies might be able to nudge students toward better decisions without limiting their freedom to choose. For example, it would be much easier for students to identify and compare relevant courses if academic catalogs were less like phone books and more like, say, Netflix. Then students could interactively search and browse on dimensions like course subject, timing, difficulty, prerequisites, major requirements or instructor ratings. Over time, students could be offered personalized suggestions based on their previous choices. New students could even be offered the equivalent of a prix fixe menu, offering a limited selection of prepackaged pathways while still allowing students to choose à la carte.

Contrast in tone or value - light / dark

Relating the design elements to the the idea being expressed