I’ve posted fairly often on the videos of German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder , who posted YouTube videos dealing not only with her heterodox approach to modern physics, but also with subjects like consciousness, free will, and transsexuality. According to Wikipedia, her most recent academic positions were at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (until 2023) and since then at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s Center for Mathematical Philosophy. (Her personal website is here.)
No longer. In this 14-minute video called “I failed,” Hossenfelder explains why she now has no formal academic job but is doing only YouTube videos.
The story is familiar to many Americans. Unable to secure a permanent, tenured position, Hossenfelder was told that because she was a woman, she should apply for female-limited scholarships that weren’t tenured and depended on getting grants to get a salary. So, as for many academics in America, that academic job depended on getting grants. And those grants come with substantial “overhead” given to the institution: money that can be used to support other endeavors of the institution. (In America, federal grants can come with 50% or higher overhead, so if you get a million bucks for your own research, the institution gets $500,000+ on top of that. It’s supposed to be used to support the infrastructure of your lab, like water, electricity, maintenance, and the like, but the university simply puts it in a big pot and uses it for nearly anything.)
This system is a way to turn untenured faculty into money earners to support the institution, and explains why so many faculty, tenured or otherwise, are under constant pressure to get grants. Even if you have tenure, in many places your promotion and salary increases depend getting grants, though the University of Chicago is one of the few places I know of in which discussion of grants is forbidden when the tenure and promotion committee decides your fate. Research accomplishment, service to the university, and teaching are all that matters.
As an untenured academic, Sabine had no security, and on top of that she became part of the system (also prevalent in America), in which a senior professor heading a lab simply tells his minions what to do and then slaps his or her name on whatever papers come out of the lab. This “paper production machine,” as Sabine calls it, is a way for the Boss to get a c.v. bloated with many papers on which he or she didn’t do any work, but procured the money to support. In other words, the Boss writes the grants and the minions do the work that helps the Boss advance and get further grants.
I have to say that I find this system repugnant, but it’s what both Americans and Sabine have to deal with. I avoided it by doing my own research with my own hands—after all, that, and not writing grants, was the fun part—and by not putting my name on papers in which I didn’t actively participate (correcting a student’s paper or just funding the work doesn’t count!). But I also discovered that the NIH, which funded my research throughout my career, didn’t care whether or not my name was on the papers I listed as “accomplishments” in my grant proposals; they wanted only to see what you had done with the money (i.e., how many decent papers came out of my lab, whether or not I was an author). Thank goodness for that! But see below for its effects on my psyche.
But I digress. Sabine went through a series of jobs and grants, constrained by the German system to do research that was a bit “edgy,” but not the kind of research she wanted to do. Caught up on this grant-and-paper recursion, unable to do the research she loved, and married (with twins) to a man who worked in Sweden (e.g., commuting), she became unhappy and depressed. Eventually, as she says, she applied for grants in areas where she did want to work, but she didn’t get grant funding. Without that money, she didn’t have a job. And so she had to leave academia.
As she says matter-of-factly (but clearly distressed), her academic career finished as “the story of a young scientist whose dreams died” and “the story of an old scientist who thinks they a who could have made a difference if it hadn’t been necessary to get past five reviewers who didn’t share [her] interests.” She tries to put a good face on her tale by saying that she found on YouTube “a community of people” who share her interests. In the end, she says she’s found an honest trade by swapping knowledge for viewers’ attention.
The video ends with a bump as she says, “I’m not sure if I’m going to post this video. It’s a bit too much, isn’t it?” She did post it. No, it’s not too much, though it’s sad and it tells you how the system works for both tenured and untenured academics.
Watch below, and then I’ll say a bit more afterwards.
I want to tell a personal story that buttresses Sabine’s tale of the importance of grants. From the beginning of my career, it was necessary to get federal grants, and for two reasons. Most important, I was an experimental evolutionary geneticist, and needed money to support my lab and my students. Your “setup” money that they give you when you begin a job (my first position was at the University of Maryland) runs out after a year or two, and you have to start writing grants as soon as your butt hits your first office chair.
Second, at Maryland grants were important to do the research that would get you promoted to tenure. Even at Chicago, I couldn’t do lab work or support my Ph.D. students unless I had a grant. And without research and publications, one couldn’t do the work you wanted, and your career would tank.
Fortunately, I was funded by the NIH from the outset, and was lucky enough to keep the same grant for 33 years without an interruption of funding. (There was pressure to get more than one grant, but I resisted it; I was happy with a single grant that could fund the work I wanted to do, and didn’t want to spend my life writing grants so I could be part of “the paper production machine.”) Grants are hard to write, and I usually began writing one six months before it was due.
The way the NIH informs you of your fate is first via a letter—a letter in which there is a pink piece of paper that gives you your rating: at that time ratings went from 100 (best) to 500 (worst). That number give you an idea if your grant fared well, but whether or not you get funded came via a subsequent phone call. I remember how my hands shook when I opened the NIH letters, and how pleased I was to see a good score (my last one was 103, nearly perfect). From the score, you had a good idea if you’d get funded, and, after the phone call confirming that came, I was very happy that I had another 3 years of funding (I had 11 straight funding bouts).
But, as a lugubrious Jew (is that redundant?), my happiness was ephemeral. For I almost immediately began worrying about the NEXT grant. Would I be able to do the research I was just funded for so that I could get the grant renewed again?
The day I decided to retire, I felt a great weight lift off my shoulders, but I didn’t understand why. Then I realized: I never had to apply for another grant again! It turns out that during my whole career, the fear of losing my grant had gnawed silently at my insides, like a tapeworm. Now there was no more fear, and for several years I simply enjoyed my research and stopped worrying about grant deadlines and renewals.
The upshot is that I fully understand Sabine’s malaise. The academic grant-and-paper system isn’t great, but I don’t see an alternative right now. But I do know that grants should be given for research accomplished rather than research proposed (the latter, occupying about 15 single-spaced pages, is what took me so long to write a grant). If this alternative were the case, I wouldn’t have had to spend six months planning what I would do in advance—a nearly impossible task anyway. I understand, although I may be wrong, that this is how the Canadian granting system works: everyone gets some money for their first grant, and then for subsequent grants you write a very short proposal whose kernel is describing what you did (and published) with the last grant. If you keep your record of accomplishment going, you keep getting your grant. That system saves an enormous amount of time.
h/t Norm
Question…can’t the universities fund some of their own research, instead of making their professors go out and grovel for grants?
Or, at the very least provide administrative support on what must be a very tedious process? Take some of those DEI folks and convert them into a grant support team (almost like a paralegal that supports lawyers), making them actually useful.
It depends on the university. Public universities usually have very limited ability to budget for direct support of research, and when they do it’s typically directed by the politicians of their state down very specific lines. Some have separate endowments, or pots of money from IP licensing, which they have more discretion over. Private universities might seem like they have more leeway (and a few of them have huge amounts of capital available, of course) — but ‘donor servicing’ is always a consideration.
From what I’ve seen, aside from small travel grants and short-term research trips, most university-funded research is actually supported by private endowments to the institution that are specifically earmarked for some specific research program or even project. (Or, in big-ticket cases, research institutes or centers hosted within the university framework but semi-independent, financially.) I cant’ really recall seeing ‘research’ as a significant line item in a university’s general budget.
There is also a lot of competition internally amongst various researchers so they want to secure the information about their grants as much as possible (a pain for accounting folks and the systems that support them sometimes) as well as external competition from other institutions. So the details of the grant revealing research is highly confidential. This is something that was new to me when I started working in higher Ed. It may not affect things with grants in the long term but it adds a unique cultural element around funding.
Thankfully, there is some degree of meritocracy left in academia.
Fundraising is de facto the only criterion used to judge such ‘merit’.
The year I left academia, I had a grant proposal in the works at the NSF. It was for about $250,000 for a period of three years. My heart wasn’t in it, and I thought that in the grand scheme of things, the work I was proposing wasn’t very important. It was pretty esoteric, as lot of research is. But it was certainly in the mainstream for paleontological research.
During the time that the proposal was being vetted at the NSF, I was deciding whether to leave academia or not. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I got the grant. Would I stay and do the work I proposed, or would I not accept the money and move on? I didn’t get the grant. I left academia. And I had a fantastic second career without the pressure to get grants!
I understand Sabine’s feelings and her deep disappointment in not fulfilling her dream.
‘And those grants come with substantial “overhead” given to the institution: money that can be used to support other endeavors of the institution.’
— If that money is used to support _other endeavors_, it is a criminal violation. If someone knows that a grant-receiving institution is doing this with indirect costs (NIH, NSF, DOE, etc.), they should report it.
‘It’s supposed to be used to support the infrastructure of your lab, like water, electricity, maintenance, and the like, but the university simply puts it in a big pot and uses it for nearly anything.)’
— If a university is putting indirects in a big pot and using it for nearly anything, that’s huge malfeasance on the part of the univerity, but also on the part their NIH program officers and HHS IDC negotiators/auditors — this should be front-page news. (Well, front-page for nerd broadsheets, anyway).
It’s a pity that so few PIs, despite seeing so clearly that this goes on, step up and go to the OIG.
I’m not sure how overhead is used, to be sure, so perhaps I was a bit hasty in writing that. That said, Sabine implies that in Germany overhead is used to pay for all kinds of stuff.
Maybe it works differently in the US, but in my experience, universities regard whatever money they get as theirs to do with as they see fit. Faculties, schools and departments not only need to bring in enough students and research funding to pay for their own operations, they have to fund the central management, which doesn’t do any teaching or research.
I was struck by her comment about overheads in the German system, as the little I knew about it (from c. 2010) was that they weren’t attached to grant awards at all (publicly-funded ones, I mean). I may not have understood at the time, and they may have shifted to a more US-style model in the last fifteen years, of course!
Yeah from my experience when i worked in higher Ed the accounting had to be precise and the research dollars all had to go to research.
I share much of Sabine’s (and Jerry’s) malaise about how the granting/academia process works, at least in the U.S. Perhaps a more meaningful metric of a scientist’s merit or legacy might be PRODUCTIVITY (as measured e.g. by published output) PER TAXPAYER DOLLAR SPENT. The denominator in such an equation might even incentivise scientists to put more emphasis on research output and less on grant acquisition. Insofar as I can tell, it seems that the Canadian system might come a bit closer to this goal.
I was in charge of several grant review committees at NIMH/NIH. In addition to the regular research grants there are career awards which are more based on accomplishments than on future plans. As long as past accomplishments are shown the grant was likely to be renewed. There are both early career and senior investigator versions of these awards.
I talked to someone on NIH panels this morning, and was told that yes, there are career awards, but to get one you usually have to have a “regular” grant (an R01) as well. I don’t think you can have a short career-based grant for years and years without ever having to write a “regular” grant.
Sadly the UK is heading ( or even arrived) that way as well. Peter Higgs admitted over 10 years ago that he would have been fired if he hadn’t been nominated for a Npbel ( which he, of course, won). To quote from the Guardian article: “Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system
And in coincidences I really don’t like, the day I wrote this Peter Higgs died.
I watched Sabine’s video a couple of days ago. I feel very sorry for someone who I respect.
That is a real shame. But she has considerable energy and effectiveness in communicating science and other intellectual areas to the general public. So maybe book writing and science documentaries, a la Carl Sagan? This seems to be a real passion for her after all.
” I avoided it by doing my own research with my own hands—after all, that, and not writing grants, was the fun part—and by not putting my name on papers in which I didn’t actively participate”
Kudos to you, boss. Really. I haven’t been at uni for 30 years (except night law school 20 years ago, a diff animal), but I hadn’t noticed it has changed so much as Sabine and you say. All the incentives are fucked.
I wonder if this just stamping one’s name seal (to use a Japanese metaphor) on one’s juniors’ work has always been there? Big shot profs basically steal the work product of post-docs, etc.?
(My Dad was a prof of Eco History in Australia but I have no idea.)
I quite like her channel, even if I don’t always agree with her.
hahha. I bet you, like I do when I think about Wall St. and my former career there, often say: “Glad I’m out of THAT system!”
D.A.
NYC
Pondering here: I wonder how, say, U. Michigan’s TEN MILLION dollar DEI expenses could be put to better use? Research wise.
Surely let’s not devote it to actual research. Given the damage “implicit bias” (un-hunted witches in your head) or the trauma cisheteronormativity is doing to our society, let’s *increase* funding to the witchfinders I say.
Let’s see how crazy this shit can get!
😉
D.A.
NYC
At the next-to-last renewal of my RO1 grant from NIH, one reviewer wrote: “This has been a fairly productive program,
for a small laboratory“. I mistakenly took this as a compliment, whereas I should have understood it as a warning—-which is why it was my next-to-last renewal in many years of continuous NIH research support.
To me, it does sound as a compliment. The system is horrible!
I’m curious about the Canadian system, described here as awarding grants more upon the record of past accomplishment. I wonder if it would liberate a researcher to take more of a chance (if they dare) on researching a hunch, or something that is otherwise non-mainstream or “fringe.” For example, in astronomy, I doubt you could get funding these days to explore or test theories that run counter the mainstream “cold dark matter” universe, let alone counter the big bang theory (to wit: Arp). This is what makes modern science so different from the past… in the past, scientists (funded by wealthy patrons?) would propose all sorts of crazy theories and investigate them. Most would fail, but some would succeed and revolutionize the field (I’m thinking plate tectonics for example).
Awarding grants more upon a record of past accomplishment has at least two strong upsides: (1) it identifies and rewards the most productive scientists; and (2) it indeed liberates them to take more of a chance on researching a hunch or something that is unorthodox.
Nope. They will be under much more pressure to accomplish something, so they will not research hunches that have a high chance of producing nothing.
I think you are right.
But the best scientists will figure this out and adjust their research programs accordingly, doing both “safe” and “risky” research in some suitable ratio.
This really hits home. Both Sabine’s and Jerry’s words and experiences are pretty damn accurate about what goes on in science today. I am about two years out from retirement and for probably the last 5 years have reverted to my old graduate student state. No more grant writing. Working only on projects that interest me (and thankfully can be done on the very cheap w/o grant support). I also had the good fortune of just getting enough grants to both get a job and then tenure. Also, the good luck of working at a University that both occasionally gave me some research support and promoted me, despite my being uneconomical. And, having grad students who were great at getting their own funding!
So, here’s my two cents to add to the list of what is wrong from personal experience, and maybe suggestions to fix it (that will never be implemented).
1. There should be absolutely no overhead for universities attached to research grants. ‘Overhead’ is now creeping towards 60% at the most prestigious institutions. This incentivizes universities and departments to hire people in expensive research fields that can only be done with massive amounts of expensive support (and therefore massive overhead riches). Great research can still be done with thousands of dollars rather than millions, but the overhead payoff is unimpressive. Good luck now in finding a tenure track position at a research university in ‘cheap’ science fields like animal behavior or taxonomy.
2. NSF funding is always chasing the new shiny and ‘interdisciplinary’ initiative even if the inter part makes no sense. The funding lasts for five years and then the whole initiative dies on the vine. But on to the next great inter! Anyone here remember BioComplexity???! Having been part of such efforts, they are a ton of work, make little coherent sense, and require a research team where most of members just add their name, do little work to write it, and get a $$$ handout if somehow the whole thing gets funded.
3. I am glad to see that Jerry was funded for 33 years. Money well spent. But I also remember as a young scientist, trying to break into the NSF system, the frustration of certain big shots always getting money although their last influential papers had been published 20 years ago, and everything since was just minor variations on a theme.
4. Submitting a proposal and being told by a reviewer I needed more data for ‘proof of concept’. Doing experiments to prove the concept, resubmitting, and being told by reviewers the project was now trivial because the interesting stuff had been done.
5. Submitting and resubmitting two really good and innovative proposals that generally garnered good reviews. And having both ranked consistently as “low priority”. Sabine correctly says that one’s career can be frustrated by a small number of reviewers who don’t share your interests. The same can happen due to one program officer who happens to have different priorities. This was the final straw for me to give up on NSF.
End of venting.
Suggestions.
1. NSF should only fund proposals submitted by individuals or groups that make inherent sense to be collaborative. No more special initiatives! Trust the people who do science to know what the next exciting advances ought to be. This would support a greater diversity of researchers and more people in their labs, such as grad students and postdocs. You want diversity in science? Then fund diverse people doing science and not diversity programs!
2. Sadly, universities need overhead to keep research going. However, rather than overhead from individual grants, departments should have to submit proposals for block grants. These would be funded relative to the publication and achievement record of the entire department. This would provide incentive for universities to actually hire more people in more fields who subsequently run productive labs that do not always need to be rolling in $$$ – rather than search for the rare megastar cash cow.
I get where you’re coming from, sincerely. But (of course there’s a ‘but’), specifically Fix #1 —
If the big-ticket grantor institutions stopped providing indirect costs (‘overheads’), who is going to accept the grants? These grants are, remember, not made to individual researchers, but to institutions that host the research. How many universities are going to agree to accept grants that come with an ‘unfunded mandate’ to provide staff, oversight, reporting, safety, payroll, insurance, light and heat, IT services, floor space, and all the rest?
How many universities are going to hire on a successful mid-career (let alone senior) researcher who comes with a portfolio of active grants which could cost the university six figures a year to run? Where’s that money going to come from?
I’m pretty sympathetic, but to implement this would have huge knock-on effects on the management of universities (and state governments, for many of them) and on individual academics’ careers, which advocates are often quick to handwave away.
Suggestion #2 is really interesting, I don’t think I’ve heard it before, and I’m definitely going to be thinking about it for a while to come. Thanks!
Yes, you cannot have #1 without #2 or something like it that replaces the critical role that overhead currently plays in making science possible. However, when you see colleagues coming up for promotion and the literally the first thing mentioned is how many and how big their grants are as the most important quality metric, I think that doesn’t serve science well in the long run.
Even before DEI (I admit I respect the basic motive but not the course of action) came about there were serious and, in my book, sleezy aspects of the community.
I have stories, man; stories.
Because of the nature of science, you can’t measure it in terms of effectiveness, because science has to tolerate a high probability of failure, and because of human inertia （scientific organizations that are told they don’t have to produce results to get funding will rot like some government departments（parasitic tissue））, we can say that science backed by big government has failed.
“Publish or die” has long been criticized by scientists, but the fact is that there is probably no better way to maintain the output of publicly funded scientific research than “publish or die.”
As for hoping that society will fund research that deviates from mainstream knowledge and has a high probability of failure? This has already happened. In the post-war period, governments funded scientific research on a large scale, but as a result, unless “publish or die” is implemented, most scientists will be reduced to Parasite due to institutional inertia.
My idea is that scientific research is not engineering technology, even though scientists like to pretend that engineers’ achievements are theirs, just like philosophers like to pretend that science’s achievements are theirs. No engineer will complain that they will be fired because they cannot meet the standards. An engineer with a brilliant development experience can be fired because he has no results for several months (ex. being lazy, or “knowing that there is no result, but still pretending for money”). but the problem is that it is difficult to tell whether a scientist is pretending to work. This is why I think it is not feasible to rely on “past merit” as a criterion for funding. What is more likely to happen is a bunch of “scientific research chairs” who retire early before the age of 30.
The final solution should be to return to normal. Scientific research can only be a hobby, just like Einstein was a patent office clerk and not a university professor before he won the Nobel Prize. If someone wants to pursue research according to his own ideas, he must have his own money, which is usually the result of the work of genius (like Nikola Tesla), and in less cases luck results (such as winning the lottery). If you are funded by others to conduct research, then it is actually reasonable to be subject to the funder. The last thing scientists should expect is that society should pay for their unorthodox ideas that may not be correct, and of course since most scientists are leftist socialists they will continue to expect to live in such an unreasonable system.
Weird, I kind of agree with you, but coming at it from a leftist socialist position!
People love to remember how Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address, warned about the dangers of the military industrial complex. What everyone seems to forget is that he also wrote:
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
Funny how that bit is forgotten
What a pathetic rant. She was given an opportunity to do PhD in physics, but doing actual work–like everybody else–was beneath her. And of course thinking of where research $$ are coming from is also beneath her. She wanted full employment and complete freedom as a researcher just after getting her MS. degree. It would have served her well to read biographies of real scientists, such as Einstein and Sklodowskaya-Curie, to appreciate the sacrifices and hard work they had go through in order to be able to do physics.
I could not even finish this sad video. It is a disgrace that such entitled, narcissistic losers like her are considered as “science communicators”.
Einstein and Curie , yes they sacrificed a lot and went through hardships which the new age scientists have not undergone. However, they were from totally different era. There was no shady metrics like the h index. I have no idea , whether grants are given on the h index of an academic. This article says it all
Toward the Discovery of Citation Cartels in Citation Networks
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00049/full
Here is Gaming the metrics book by MIT press. It is available as a download.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537933/gaming-the-metrics/
The question is do grant giving authorities rely on metrics of an individual or do they read the full paper. Please enlighten the readers.
You should read
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/01/problems-in-harvard-medical-school-studies-include-images-taken-from-other-researchers-papers-and-vendor-websites/
These web sites are by Dr Elizabeth Bik winner of the John Maddox award . John Maddox was the editor of Nature journal , when it was not called a luxury journal.
This lady has been doing great service by weeding out the rubbish ( there are loads of it).
Mir gefällt die Präsentation Frau Hossenfelders auch nicht.
Sie ist ja offenkundig ziemlich beschlagen in der Physik.
Wieso versucht Sie nicht die Lehre besser zu machen?
Das ist mühevoll, aber sehr ehrenwert.
ZB Werner Mauer -ehemals ETH – macht das mit sehr guten Videos.
Nimmt auch Leute mit Ing Level mit.
Auf Englisch bitte.
BTW , PR suggests teaching for SH. Does Germany have teaching colleges like US? Yes , SH would make a very good teaching academic in a teaching college.
Yours is rant as well, and rather needlessly cruel. I would say that Sabina’s videos have provided humour and realism with a sensible balance to keep me aware what was going on across a variety of disiplines. To Sabina—You certainly did not fail me! Thank you
I first encountered this sort of grant based fashion biased groupthink in physics in the 1990s. During childhood I had suffered frequency distorted hearing and speech problems, so I was used to “groupthink” nuts and knew how to fight back hard against them. However, the money issue dominated everything, even in the mainstream media. A journalists judges ideas not by merit or even by false claims made against advances by ignorant so-called “academics”, but by its funding. So corruption persists in science, just as it does in everything else. The few people who manage to “speak up” without being totally no-platformed for their divergences from fashion, people like Peter Woit and Sabine, have at best zero interest in anything outside their own particular alternative realities, sadly. Maybe things will change when humans evolve out of fashion based groupthink stupidity, in a few trillion years?
I’m a retired evolutionary biologist and anatomist (having drifted into these fields from philosophy and mathematics), and I watched Hossenfelder’s video a couple of days ago.
I was lucky in my academic career, in that I was primarily a theorist, something which in my branch of evolutionary biology, and unlike in theoretical physics, requires only something to write with and sometimes calculate with. I of course also never got tenured, but my renewable 3-year contracts with the University of Massachusetts/Amherst kept me in a job and gave me the credibility needed for publication in respectably journals. But I did get an eyeful of what my tenured and tenure-track colleagues had to go through, and this included my major advisor.
I deeply sympathize with her, and of course also thought of all the people who have never set foot on a University or College campus and yet disparage academics who do nothing but get miraculously “funded” repeatedly, as if scholarly funding were some sort of glorified welfare. These people, nearly always right-wing conservatives, have no inkling of the realities of what they think are cushy lives.
I am sorry for Sabine. I hope that she will eventually find some field where some of her dreams can be revived.
I often discuss with my friends that we’d wish science to advance at half its current pace but scientists to be regarded and to feel more like happy, accomplished human beings, and less like cogs in a senseless machine. In fact, I am not sure whether scientific progress will be slowed down. Because currently, the pressure to “publish and perish” leads to fraudulent research and plain data fabrication being published, and untangling the resulting untruths takes a lot of time and resources.
Professor
What is the role of metrics like h index play in awarding grants for an individual grant proposal
Second , do the men of eminence who hold the power to award grants read the papers word by word or do they rely on metrics ( h index).
Dr. Hossenfelder, A sincere thanks! After finding your articles on Dark Energy and Climate Change yesterday, plus the range of your other writings and YouTube presentations, I gained a more vital and meaning-rich understanding of my PhD thesis done 50 years ago in Philosophy at Boston College. The theme: “Work and Meaning, a Phenomenological Inquiry” (Based on Husserl’s “Inner Time Consciousness”).
Your position on April 9th is more of a loss for LMU’s Center for Mathematical Philosophy. They and many others may still be stuck in Minkowski’s 4-Dimensional view of Einstein. Interestingly enough, Jean-Luc Lehners of the Albert-Einstein-Institute in Potsdam-Golm, in an article in the SZ März 30, 3024, on “What is Time?” was asked whether Einstein’s statement that “Time is what one sees on the clock?” is true. His response: “Yes, it is!” (How sad!)
What a pity that Weyl and his wife could never bring Einstein and Husserl together, perhaps for a day at Nockherberg, to discuss and weave their two approaches to Space and Time. Thanks to your and others’ efforts, it is finally starting to happen.
After a hundred years of separate development, what’s emerging now is the growing recognition of a 6-Dimensional understanding of Reality: 3 of each for Space and Time.
As you know, Ibn-Haytham, a thousand years ago, uncovered the dynamics of the Optics of Light. Only now are we beginning to understand the Optics of Insights, made possible by the dramatic interplay of Time’s three elements, the dynamics of meaning, valuing, and energy (Chi, Ki, Prana) stepping on life’s stage. Moreover, both “Intentionality” and “Nonduality” (Sanskrit: Advaita) are also critical operational elements. Finally, the separation of subject and object, finite and infinite, secular and spiritual, begins to come together. We are no longer worried “Objects” in SPACE but lively “Aspirations” in TIME!
Again, in your timely and powerful recent video on Climate Change, you reflected on how “mindfuckingly stupid” so many of us are for not understanding the dynamic that could have an even more powerful negative impact on our collective future. As I’ve been teaching in TUM’s master’s program in Sustainable Resource Management for many years, I genuinely appreciate your point.
Remember Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus, and his profound short-sightedness? He readily accepted Pandor and her Jar (bBx) even when warned not to. Moreover, when asked to give all living creatures their key characteristics, Epimetheus ran out of ideas when humans approached. Is this not still our tragic state of affairs?
Could it be that one of the key elements of the evil and violent forces still coming out of Pandora’s box is “Time’s Arrow?” Thinking chronologically (Chronos), we cannot grasp the meaning of what is happening in an energetic manner (Kairos)!
You already understand this intellectually, emotionally, and intuitively in your powerful reflective writing and presentations. And having read the latest work by Thomas Hertog (with Hawking), you are living their conclusion: ‘We create the universe as much as the universe creates us.” Moreover, as you know Rovelli’s work, perhaps his “White Holes” is the context in which we come alive, having passed through so many black holes of our creation, something I wrote a sort note about some time ago: https://muslimheritage.com/reflections-optics-time/
In short, our Climate Crisis is a Consciousness Crisis, and you are making a timely contribution to this shift towards TIMEspace — a deep and sincere thanks!