How to appeal to academia?

It is now clear that the appetite for research within my company is diminished. Funding is evaporating and the team membership is below critical mass. This makes it harder to build up again and does not bode well. When times get hard research is always the easy target as I guess it is the least likely to produce quick results. I've seen this coming for some time, in fact as soon as I started. So today I completed an application for an academic position. This is not the first one I have done and so far the statistics are not in my favour. I am hopeful the latest attempt will be treated with more of an open mind than previous ones. The thing about working in industry is that, well, its not academia. Hence there is no teaching of undergraduates, fewer publications  and less interaction with the academic system. So when it comes to assessing suitability to work in academia its easy to find someone whose experience is more familiar to academics. I would like to hope that eventually someone in academia will see the benefit that could arise from a different approach to the world, but I understand that competition for positions is very strong and there is no shortage of the young and talented  to choose from.
How then can I make what I have to offer stand out? Well in these times of restricted funding and a seemingly crazy elitist approach that seeks to cull off the little guys, it seems that an understanding of how industry thinks might be quite useful, especially when economic impact is king. That is my  feeble hope. Often though it comes down to publications and that is always going to be an issue. Journal publications are not a priority in industry. Their value is not obvious, quite the reverse, they eat into your profit. I have been denied the chance to publish work quite a few times on the grounds of lack of funds to support the writing. There have also been some things I am not allowed to publish. How can you make that work count for something with academic establishments?
I am a little more hopeful of this application than pevious ones, but I am not holding my breath.

The utility of physics

In a recent blog post about  the utility of physics the case was made that we physicists should not be shy about making it known to the world how physics research has been turned into really useful technology that we like to use without realising where it has come from. I'm all for an honest appraisal about how pertinent physics is. Unfortunately I dont think it is as straightforward as might appear. You see its all tarnished by the politics of funding. You coat the history of technology with a varnish of being physics and it gives funding reviewers a warmer feeling that physics research will lead to something. Its all part of the game that plays at spending billions on fundamental research that has a follow through into wider society where the research has applications for....(enter whatever topic is currently in vogue). Particle physics is particularly suscepticle to this. Particle physics has been spending billions for decades on fundamental research that is frankly only understood by those physicists working in the field. Yes the research looks at the most fundamental properties of nature, but so far the LHC has been extremely successful at finding a particle we have been expecting to find for over 20 years and comfimed that the "standard model" (the most inappropiate name for a theory of 'everything')  is correct - except that it isn't! The justification for spending huge amounts of resource  is generally given in terms of the trickledown tecnology  with such things as medical scanners and the internet being claimed as resulting from the particle physics research. But this is a little disingenuous. It's certainly true that the germ of the idea originated as a consequence of fundamental research - particularly for  medical scanners - but both the particle physics and nuclear physics communities claim credit for this and use it as part of their justifcation to carry on fundamental research. It has to be trickle down technology because paticle physics is now at such a universal extreme that there are few places in the universe where it might actually be useful, so the results of the research itself will probably never be widely used (but what we really want to  know is will it lead to the development of warp drive!).  Turnng the concept into something useful is generally done through a tremendous amount of hard work on the part of development engineers , not physicists - and that in itself is a very important point. Often it is the physicists who are the concievers or the catalysts that can spark off new ideas.

All technology operates on fundamental physical principles. Just because and iphone uses a chip that uses a transistor, or a camera that makes use of optics, or a MEMS based accelerometer doesn't mean that physics lead to the iphone.  Everything uses physics somewhere.    The economics and politics of scientific research now mean that every grant application has to state that there will be technological and economic impact that results from this work, and sensibly, this cannot be so. Every month I read dozens of articles on sites like  physorg   where the culmination of piece is to say this could find application in ..., usually a quantum computer. Its clear that this cant be true in every case   and yet is every funding body expecting this? How long should we expect to wait?  Superconductivity was going to transform power distribution when relatively high temperature opration was discovered in the late 1980's, but this has proved to be an impractical dream so far. In fact the best use of supeconductivity so far is to provide the magenetic field for the LHC (and that use liquid He so is not high temperature). Nuclear fusion has been sold as the dream for supplying cheap energy but it is always 30 years away, and has been for 50 years.
I am a firm believer that physics is everywhere and an understanding of physics is a creative technological source.  So lets have a better understanding of the place of physics within technology, not an uncomfortable cherry picking of certain high profile scientific technologies. We should of course grasp the concept that knowledge is important for its own sake. If we want to impress upon people why physics in general is a worthwhile activity then we should compose a magnificent list of the places where physics is used in the things we find in modern society. I may start this list for myself but I expect it to be very long.





  

of quantum chickens and interdimensional insects

My chickens always find a way to escape their enclosure, despite there being no obvious aperture large enough for them to fit through. No matter how long I watch the chickens I have never caught them in the act of escaping. And yet if I stop  watching them for 30 seconds they can be on the other side of the fence. Clearly they must be quantum chickens able to tunnel from inside to outside the enclosure and the quantum zeno effect occurs when I constantly observe the spatial coordinate of said chicken relative to a high gravitational barrier. Ridiculous I know but not the first time the animal world has behaved peculiarly.
Have you ever found an insect in an odd location and wondered how on earth it got there. There are always plenty of dead insects inside fluorescent light fittings. But how do flys get in between the panes of double glazing? I expect they must travel through an additional dimension and materialize in a confined space they cannot then get out of - due to some velocity dependent effect that cannot be replicated inside the glazing.
No I am not seriously suggesting that there is new physics in this. This is not an example of inadequate knowledge, meerly of inadequate observations. But sometimes...