<p>Okay, for all of the professors/ grad students out there, help me get something straight:</p>
<p>Is Academia about squabbling over ideas? Or am I being simple minded here? Please tell me. Because I went to this faculty meeting and an intellectual brawl almost occurred over a small difference in ideas.</p>
<p>Is this how academia works? Like:</p>
<p>Professor Z finds an amazing discovery. Professors A-L jump on the bandwagon and support Professor’s Z findings with case studies and their own analysis. Professors M-R disagree and bring in their own evidence to counter the findings of Professor Z. Professors S-V don’t give a damn and haven’t published in years. Professors W-Y research and research and find another amazing discovery. Cycle continues.</p>
<p>Research (and scholarship) is the process of building upon what other scholars have found and either supporting that evidence with replications, branching into related fields with empirical evidence, or refuting what other scholars have found by countering it with empirical evidence. It’s not a “squabble” because a squabble implies a cacophony of voices that inspires some kind of nonsensical feud. Academics don’t generally feud - if they disagree with something they use scientific evidence to counteract that (or if they’re in the humanities, their equivalent of evidence) and publish it somewhere.</p>
<p>I’d say the only thing I’d add to OP’s summation is that Professor W-Z’s discoveries aren’t independent. They may “research and research” or find some amazing discovery, but likely their discovery is based upon the discoveries of many researchers before them.</p>
<p>Heh, I was in a lab where we were the only people in the world doing the measurements we were doing, and nobody believed what we were measuring. They’d counter our measurements with simulations based on the theory we were saying was incorrect, then say how we’re wrong because our measurements don’t match up with their predictions.</p>
<p>Computational science is a plague and it seems like for every good prediction there are about 10 bad ones based on models that are too simple or idealized (or wrong, can’t forget that one). As an experimentalist, I feel your pain RacinReaver.</p>
<p>RacinReaver, literally the exact same thing has been happening with us and a couple of computationalists out at Stanford. </p>
<p>It was somewhat funny, they got all bent out of shape that our data and their predictions didn’t match, claiming how we were wrong, yada yada yada. We had in essence scaled our experiment way back so that we could actually compare our work to their work, but in reality we have gone well beyond the scope of what they were trying to do. So when they starting complaining our advisor decided to send them the proverbial middle finger and do our tests well past their capabilities. At which point they couldn’t refute our work any more. And some icing on the cake, another experimental group got involved in this and their work supports everything we did as well. </p>
<p>^^a nice example of how the system works well!</p>
<p>The experimental group were in essence pushed to do their proof at the highest resolution so that their results had the greatest impact. Didn’t hurt that they won the argument, but the open process pushes all of us to go beyond “essentially proving our point” to actually proving it to the best resolution possible at this time!</p>
<p>The problem for that group I was in was the theory has been around for the last 30 years or so and came from a very well respected member of that research community. The experiments are crazy tedious (the data I worked on had been collected over the course of three graduate students across 12 years) and nobody in their right mind would want to do this much microscopy.</p>
<p>I just couldn’t believe how angry people were during the research presentation at a conference I attended. Like, there was actual shouting and angry old man fist shaking.</p>
<p>but it will make for great stories later! This does tend to happen when there are big shifts in the dogma. Probably all of those in the audience had a great time watching the drama.</p>