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Atheist Action Central say "If you have not read any of these books I would read them in the following order for the following reasons"...
reposted from: AAC
HERE'S one thing we learned this month: no two scientists have the same experience during their master's or PhD. New Scientist has talked to a wide range of prominent researchers about their postgraduate years, and discovered a great deal about their personal journeys to the top flight of science (see "What I've learned...").
However, these conversations also provided a reminder that there are feelings, encounters and moments that the majority of postgrad students will almost definitely share. Some things are specific to a PhD, others are just as common during a master's or other course after your degree. So from the moment you decide to commit to further study through to life afterwards, here's what to expect as a postgrad.
The first discovery is a deep-rooted passion for your subject
You may have kept it hidden from your friends so far, for fear of losing a hard-earned "slacker" reputation. You may even have struggled to come to terms with it yourself. But the main thing any undergraduate realises when they decide to commit to a PhD or master's is just how much they love their discipline.
Discovering this is good news, of course: a consuming interest in your subject is probably the most important ingredient for success, says Mike Owen, head of the Biopharmaceuticals Centre of Excellence for Drug Discovery at GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage. "You will only negotiate the inevitable low points by complete commitment to your research project."
However, just like the difference between falling in love and tying the knot, a passion for your subject does not necessarily come at the same time as knowing you want to commit to years more of study.
Do not worry if you are not completely confident that you are making the right decision - sometimes that doesn't come until later. For instance, Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, says he was not sure of his choice until a year into his PhD (see "What I've learned...").
Success as an undergraduate does not guarantee success later
Clearly, anyone considering staying on at university and pursuing an academic career should have shown achievement as an undergraduate and demonstrated potential, but don't assume you need to have been the top of your class nor be expecting a first. Nor will you necessarily need to have been capable across every area - witness space scientist Colin Pillinger's description of his chemistry experiments (see "What I've learned...").
Conversely, success as an undergraduate does not necessarily transfer to the next level, especially to a PhD. Moving from the confines of undergrad exercises with known solutions to the potentially unbounded problems you will explore in a doctorate requires motivation, curiosity, creativity, imagination and stubbornness. If your undergraduate course has an option to do a project or dissertation module, grasp the opportunity with both hands. This is your best chance to get a feel for postgrad life.
This kind of experience can often prove a revelation. "Science was something I had fallen into," says Nancy Rothwell, vice-president of research at the University of Manchester. "But my final-year project suddenly made science seem like the most exciting thing imaginable, so a PhD was then obvious. I haven't changed that view since."
Many students who go on to do a master's or PhD do so thanks to a gatekeeper - a lecturer or professor who recognises their potential and helps set them on their journey. If there is somebody in your department encouraging you, then take it as definite sign that you might be well suited.
Do not be shy of looking beyond your department for advice. If you are enjoying a fascinating part of your subject that is beyond the scope of your lectures, why not take physicist David Deutsch's advice (page 60) and get in touch with the relevant researcher at another university?
Further down the line, choose your supervisor carefully: that relationship is the keystone of postgrad study - particularly in PhDs. Ask yourself if you would want a hands-on supervisor who you see most days, or whether you would prefer one who communicates monthly via Post-it notes in your pigeon-hole? Try to visit a department before applying, and ask students what it's like working for the various professors.
A year's worth of fretting before comprehending what your supervisor is talking about is not uncommon. In the same way that road directions are often sketchier from people who know the route, your supervisor's familiarity with their own field can mean they take your understanding of it for granted.
"It was a massive shock, being thrown into the deep end of research," says Marcus Du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. "I remember being completely flummoxed by the onslaught of foreign words in the academic papers my supervisor gave me to read. But I began to learn a new style of reading, which pulled out the big story of the paper without trying to understand all the details."
”I remember being completely flummoxed by the onslaught of foreign words
Listen carefully, note everything down and think about it in your own time. Sometimes a comment from your supervisor that confused you can come into its own months later. Your peers will be able to help you settle in, and will soon prove their worth by offering an alternative perspective on your work - something which makes all the difference when you get stuck.
It is important to be ambitious but also realistic. "Many students expect to be doing fundamental research from day one, and in most cases this is unrealistic," says Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton. "You have a lot to learn and will spend considerable time reading about what others are doing."
Funding yourself has got a bit easier
PhD students can now expect significantly more help with finances compared to a decade ago. This year, PhD students will receive a stipend of £12,300. Funding can be trickier if you do a master's, but teaching, marking, demonstrating and exam invigilation all now offer potential extra sources of money.
It is easy to reach the second year of a research-based postgraduate placement and feel you have not achieved much. In a PhD, this is when you start to make your research your own. Starting to apply your knowledge to proper, independent research can be a shock. By its nature, it leads you down blind alleys, and your supervisor can only help so much.
Expect to have setbacks and failures. Everybody struggles - if all your experiments worked first time, then your supervisor would more than likely become suspicious.
Some things will be out of your control and you will need to make the best of it. It could be that your supervisor goes on sabbatical for a chunk of your PhD - something which happened to Rothwell. "At the time I thought it was a real disadvantage, but it made me stand on my own two feet," she recalls.
Time away from your desk can provide the inspiration that makes the difference between a breakthrough and banging your head against the wall. Teaching and other departmental responsibilities mean that you do something positive every week, even when your research does not go to plan. Not only is communicating ideas an important skill to have, teaching refreshes your broader understanding of your subject.
Your results are no good unless others believe them
You will reach a stage where you understand the intricate details of what you are doing more than your supervisor does. He or she will still be there to give you general guidance but, more importantly, to check your results. You need to be as sure as possible that these are correct. This is one of the single most important lessons to learn as a postgraduate, and this kind of rigour will also be central to your integrity as a scientist, which makes it highly valued in the job market.
Somewhere along the way, you will probably attend academic conferences. This is a chance to meet some of the top people in the field and get some fresh perspectives on your work.
Seeing what others are working on can be invaluable for triggering thoughts about your own research. Hearing about the hurdles other research students have faced can also be quite reassuring.
If you do not like talking in public, then this is the time to sort it out. Speaking about something you are passionate about can do wonders for the nerves. Writing a talk forces you to think about the structure and main messages of your thesis, which of course will help you write and present the thing later on.
"You can do the most amazing experiments or make the most astounding observations, but if you fail to communicate them, you might as well never have done the work," says Mike Benton, professor of palaeontology at the University of Bristol.
In a PhD, one of the final hurdles is an oral defence of your thesis - or viva - to two experts in the field. It may be a two to three-hour grilling but, on the bright side, it is also a rare opportunity to talk non-stop about your research to people who will actually listen.
You pick up other useful life skills too
Time in academia beyond your degree will expand your abilities in ways few other things can. "Getting that final degree changed my life and opened opportunities for me in ways I surely still don't understand," says Paul Nahin, professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Aside from your technical knowledge, you will learn organisation, prioritisation, critical thinking and self-motivation.
The idea that an extra piece of paper will make you unemployable or overqualified outside academia is a fallacy. In fact, as few as one-quarter of UK science PhD students stay in academia, according to figures from the UK GRAD programme, which aims to improve the career chances of postgraduate researchers.
At the same time, a postgraduate qualification is no guarantee of a job in academia. "The career ladder is tough, but it has to be," says Benton. As a researcher you are creating knowledge, not following a well-beaten track, so only the most creative and persistent will do."
Whatever happens, it will be time well spent
Towards the end, things unexpectedly start to fall into place and make sense. After months of toiling away on a handful of very specific problems, you come up for air and see where your work fits into the scientific endeavour. Your thesis becomes the story of a period of your life. Step back and you will see you have achieved a lot.
As long as you are interested in the subject, a postgraduate degree will be hard work but ultimately gratifying. "The rewards are fantastic for those who work hard and who have a real spark of originality," says Benton. "The chance to challenge received wisdom and to find something new no one has realised before are unbeatable."
And if you later find yourself picking your completed thesis off the shelf and caressing it like a small pet, do not worry - this is entirely normal behaviour.
Martin Rees is professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He is president of the Royal Society.
Andy Hopper is professor of computer technology at the University of Cambridge and head of the computer lab. He has co-founded about 12 companies.
1 Test the water
You may be unsure whether you are cut out for research. A master's gives you a taster without the long-term commitment. It also leaves the door open should you wish to do a PhD later on.
2 Build on your degree
Some master's courses are taught, rather than research-based with a thesis. On these courses, expect lectures, seminars and coursework with a dissertation at the end.
3 Earn more -in some cases
Across the overall job market, graduates with a master's are offered an average starting salary around £1000 greater than those with a bachelor's, according to a 2006 survey by the Association of Graduate Recruiters. But be warned: a master's won't necessarily win you a bigger salary in a scientific career. In a survey of New Scientist readers earlier this year, we found that the average pay of industrial scientific researchers with a master's was around the same as a bachelor's - around £26,000 to £27,000. Only a PhD seems to make the difference in science, with an average salary of £36,000.
4 And finally... live longer
With a master's you'll live to a riper old age. That's the conclusion of a study by Robert Erikson at Stockholm University in Sweden, who used Swedish census data to show that mortality rates dropped with a higher level of education. Between 1991 and 1996, men aged 64 with a master's or similar qualification had a lower risk of dying than those with a basic tertiary education - around 8.5 per cent versus 9.6 per cent. Those with a doctorate stuck around even longer, with a risk of death of only 6 per cent.
Richard Fisher
Colin Pillinger is a professor of planetary sciences at the Open University in Milton Keynes. He led the team that created the UK's Mars lander, Beagle 2.
David Deutsch is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford's centre for quantum computation. In 1998, he received the Paul Dirac prize medal from the Institute of Physics.
"In any creative endeavour you need a break, whether it is scientific research or anything else. The harder you work at it the more likely you are to get the break you want."
Harry Kroto, Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry, Florida State University in Tallahassee
"The movie scientist who shouts 'eureka' is far from reality. You have to be passionate about your subject and willing to endure months of drudgery."
Mike Benton, professor of vertebrate palaeontology, University of Bristol
"Often research doesn't go as expected. I discovered pulsars about two years into my PhD. It was too late to change the title of my thesis, so they appeared in the appendix."
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, visiting professor of physics, University of Oxford, who during her PhD spotted regular radio pulses from space, which were the first evidence for the existence of neutron stars
"Find an understanding spouse that won't let you quit when the going gets tough. My wife earned at least half my doctorate."
Paul Nahin, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, University of New Hampshire
"Surround yourself with smarter colleagues and listen and learn from them."
Mike Owen, head of the Biopharmaceuticals Centre of Excellence for Drug Discovery at GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage
"Think carefully about who you choose as your supervisor. It can be very inspirational to be supervised by a well-known professor, but nowadays academics can be abroad a lot. You need someone to talk to about your research on an everyday basis."
Wendy Hall, professor of computer science, University of Southampton
"It's important to make compromises sometimes. If you are going for a big theorem then sometimes you just have to accept that you won't be able to prove the whole thing. But even just a small bite out of these big problems can be fantastic progress."
Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics, University of Oxford
reposted from: New Scientist
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments
The idea of literally burying the carbon dioxide emissions problem - by storing the gas deep underground - got a double boost this week. On 10 February, an amendment to international law came into force that allows the greenhouse gas to be buried beneath the sea floor. At the same time, a new study counters one of the main fears over carbon burial - that the gas will simply leak out again, to boost future global warming.
Some companies have been experimenting with storage in undersea aquifers and porous rocks for more than a decade, but the law was unclear over whether carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant, leaving companies open to accusations of illegal dumping.
Even with the new laws, burying carbon dioxide under the seabed is likely to remain controversial because of concerns that it will eventually leak out (New Scientist, 20 November 2006, p 6). However, a team of environmental engineers now claims that these worries are unfounded, and that natural reactions will lock away the carbon dioxide within aquifers for millennia.
Ruben Juanes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues made a computer model of the movement of carbon dioxide injected into a layer of permeable rock saturated with salt water. The gas is less dense than brine and so starts to rise in a plume towards the rock surface, but the model shows that it will not continue moving. The brine clings to the insides of the rock pores, narrowing their diameter so that the plume of gas is pinched into small bubbles, which remain trapped within the pores (Water Resources Research, vol 42, p W12418).
"This is a permanent storage mechanism," says Juanes. "Carbon dioxide will stay underground indefinitely." Nevertheless, G�nter Pusch at Clausthal University of Technology in Germany believes that the gas may still leak. "If the rising plume hits a fault or fracture network, it can accelerate the upward migration," he says.
"This is a permanent storage mechanism. Carbon dioxide will stay underground indefinitely
If the gas does leak out into the oceans, a team led by Toste Tanhua at the University of Kiel in Germany has found that it will remain dissolved in seawater for longer than previously thought. This leads to increased acidity at greater depths, harming deep-water corals and marine life (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0606574104).
Juanes, however, is undeterred. "So long as the gas is injected deep enough underground, it is hard to imagine a major leak making it to the surface," he says. "Sequestration is by no means an answer to all problems, but it is an integral part of the solution."
I’ve written occasionally on the results, sometimes ludicrous and sometimes dangerous, that can follow from the unbridled, ungrounded application of “reason,” so called, to the problems of human life. (See here in particular.) Let me be more pointed.
We’re not quite sure what “reason” is, to begin with. Humans have the capacity for disciplined and systematic thought along certain lines. The Greeks are usually credited with making the most, earliest, of this fact. Mathematics and logic are our inheritance from them, along with some practical applications thereof. Aristotle, of course, gets the credit for instituting the study of formal logic, in part by systematizing kinds of syllogisms and exploring their implications. It is thus that we recognize that
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
is a valid argument, while
All men are mortal.
Socrates is mortal.
Therefore, Socrates is a man.
is not valid, even though the conclusion happens to be true.
As regards the quantifiable, mathematics does wonderfully well. And as regards certain types of well constructed sentences, logic does, too. But understanding the limits implied by “certain types of well constructed sentences” took some time. No one could blame the Greek thinkers and their early successors for their exuberance in the application of their shiny new tool. Over time it began to be said that this “reason” was a gift of the gods, or a spark of the divine within us, or – secularly speaking – a sort of mental Swiss army knife, useful in any situation.
Because we are talking about human beings, it is no surprise that over the centuries many errors of logical deduction have been committed, sometimes because of carelessness, sometimes because premises were ill founded, sometimes because the desired conclusion was in mind from the outset and logic was overcome by the determination to arrive at it.
(A charming example of this last mode of intellection can be found in the article “Government” that James Mill, father of the more famous John Stuart, wrote for an early edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In it he began from first principles and, step by painstaking step, deduced the ideal form of government, which – what were the odds? – turned out to be a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature, part elected and part hereditary!)
And sometimes errors have arisen from the fact that not everything in human life is quantifiable or narrowly logical.
By the time of René Descartes, a certain caution might have been expected, but no. Descartes was, among other things, a mathematician, and he persuaded himself that the same kind of axiomatic reasoning that worked in geometry would work in any subject matter. Thus it was that he reasoned himself into an inescapable trap called solipsism (Solipsism is the philosophical idea that "My mind is the only thing that exists". Solipsism (Latin: solus, alone + ipse, self) is an epistemological or metaphysical position that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist), whence – having rested for a time on the famous “Cogito ergo sum” thing – he couldn’t reason himself out again without an ad hoc appeal to the existence and good will of a god.
The successes of the scientific method, to say nothing of our everyday experience, ought to have taught us all by now that this faculty called reason only works well when it is fed a carefully prepared diet of quantifiable, verifiable data from the outer world. And even then it is apt to go wrong, so the results we get must always be held lightly, as current best estimates, rather than tightly, as eternal truths. Eternal truths too often begin to look like weapons, and weapons tightly held are too often used.
This dramatic image features a dark red Moon during a total lunar eclipse -- celestial shadow play enjoyed by many denizens of planet Earth last Saturday.
Recorded near Wildon, Austria, the picture is a composite of two exposures; a relatively short exposure to feature the lunar surface and a longer exposure to capture background stars in the constellation Leo. Completely immersed in Earth's cone-shaped shadow during the total eclipse phase, the lunar surface is still illuminated by sunlight, reddened and refracted into the dark shadow region by a dusty atmosphere. As a result, familiar details of the Moon's nearside are easy to pick out, including the smooth lunar mare and the large ray crater Tycho. In this telescopic view, the background stars are faint and most would be invisible to the naked eye.
reposted from: Astronomy Picture of the Day
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments
