Physics: A Lot of Politics

Physics, despite it's claim to being a science, is political in nature for two reasons.

1. Funding of one's research depends on persuading elected, selected and/or promoted political players. In graduate school after Rep. Wilber Mills drunken dunk in the Tidal Basin with Fanny Fox, I was encouraged to do research in alcoholism because that was where all the money was going to be. More obvious and immediate is local pressure to go along with the powers to be in one's department. In graduate school, I was told to take elective classes of certain professors who had been hired to give credence to the new graduate program. The married couple were virtually senile pursuing archaic research. As one fellow grad said to me, "If nobody takes their classes, it looks bad on the department hiring committee." Of course, these are examples of office politics wherein likes and dislikes dominate personality interactions. Being an anti-politics person, I abdicated from graduate school staying as long as I could to study what I wanted to learn without any thought of work in the field. Ironically, it was the properties of CO2.
2. Politics, defined herein, is the bringing issues to bear on solving problems that are issues un-related to the problem per the 4-steps to solving a problem. In public politics it is the incumbents' re-election addiction that prompts them to allocate public resources to the private few who are their biggest campaign contributor. If habitual politicians were heart surgeons, they would rinse the cracked rib cavity with a bucket dipped in the filth of an outhouse. In academia and research, it is the rose-tinted glasses that color research problem-solving. In physics, one's systemic view and subviews clouds one's perceptions and experimentation, e.g., relativity, quantum mechanics, strings, etc. If the view or subview is wrong, it misdirects one's thinking. In particular, the biggest pair of glasses tinting many minds is how the speed of light is viewed as a linear phenomenon rather than rotational. An impediment common to finding simpler and broader truths are humanocentroselfish rantings of the half-goddists who instill coke-bottle pink lenses attitudes toward life.

Politics as the formulation of bad policies by individuals and groups can described as either private or public politics . When the individual knowingly or unknowingly lies to himself to make wrong descisions, this is private politics.

NUB