Mike Boylan-Kolchin Profile picture
Apr 20, 2023 12 tweets 2 min read Read on X
A lot of the discourse on tenure has (rightly) emphasized its role in allowing faculty members to engage in research without external political influence. A less discussed but crucial aspect of tenure is its role in facilitating complex research with long time horizons. 1/
By its very nature, cutting edge research involves working at the frontier of the unknown. There is no guarantee of success on any specific problem and projects often end up in very different places from their initial goals.
The process is usually highly nonlinear in the sense that tangible progress often comes in short bursts that are separated by long periods of 'being stuck' -- but the progress phase is not possible without the work that goes into the 'stuck' phase.
Annual reports on faculty activity can reasonably reflect most teaching and service activities, but it is essentially impossible to accurately capture effort that has not paid off in the sense of resulting in publications or other tangible research products.
Many of the most important problems across a range of disciplines require sustained effort over multiple years that may not be reflected in discernible progress on the scale of a year (or even multiple years). Nonetheless, this foundational research is what enables breakthroughs.
Scholarship that does not lead to, e.g., revolutionary products is also inherently valuable in that it enriches and expands the frontiers of knowledge. By offering someone a faculty position, experts in the field are indicating the perceived value of their scholarship.
The importance of facilitating projects with time horizons that do not conform to quarterly earnings cycles has grown considerably in recent years, as many entities have significantly de-emphasized long-term, foundational research in favor of short-term results.
For the sciences, medicine, and technology, this creates a dangerous situation if there is no mechanism to ensure continued basic research without immediate applications, as all major breakthroughs inevitably rely on this. Tenure is the primary mechanism to ensure broad progress.
In social sciences and the arts, tenure allows people to ask questions that may prove to be unpopular with people in power but that can provide deep insights or simply enrich our lives. And that work, again, takes years. A single book might take a decade of research.
It is crucial to realize that progress in scholarship does not take a form that can easily be summarized on an annual report. And if we don't give people the space and time to attack all kinds of questions, we will suffer in innumerable ways, both small and large. /end
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More from @MBKplus

Jul 17, 2023
Since the question of the age of the Universe is coming up on Twitter, here's a brief primer on what we know and what we don't. Punch line: all current evidence indicates the Universe is 13-14 billion years old.
The most precise measurement of the age of the Universe (t_0) comes through observations of its oldest light, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), from an epoch when the Universe was ~1100x smaller than today. Careful measurements of the CMB give t_0=13.8 ± 0.023 billion years.
How do we get this number? It's crucial to realize that time is not a cosmological observable, it's a *derived* quantity. We measure how much light has been stretched out between emission and today (the redshift), which tells us how much the Universe has expanded.
Read 12 tweets
Jul 26, 2022
Have questions about the high-redshift galaxies that are just popping up one after the other in #JWST data and how they relate to the expansion of the Universe, expansion speeds, etc.? Here's my take, starting with a update of my plot from last week (it's hard to keep up!).
One helpful tool is a space-time diagram. The horizontal axis here shows the "comoving radial distance"; this distance is unchanging over time for galaxies that simply travel with the expansion of the Universe. The vertical axis shows time since the big bang. A spacetime diagram showing cosmic time as a function of com
I've labeled some important portions of the diagram: the black curve shows the past light cone, which is the set of points whose light is just reaching us today. That is, everything we see right now lies on the past light cone (the black line).
Read 21 tweets
Jul 24, 2021
A few further thoughts about Steven Weinberg. Disclaimer: I've only known Steve for ~6 years, so these will undoubtedly paint a picture from a specific era.
First and foremost, Steve was a remarkable intellect. And I don't just mean a brilliant physicist, one who brilliant physicists revered. He was just an unbelievably smart person who could talk intelligently about pretty much everything, from baseball to opera to military history.
He was also a passionate educator. Many people of his stature -- well, no one's really of his stature, but still -- would have spent less time on teaching after achieving fame (in Steve's case, a Nobel prize 42 years ago). Steve *increased* his teaching activities.
Read 14 tweets
Jan 24, 2019
Dan Weisz (@bigticketdw) and I wrote a white paper on Near-field Cosmology for the Astro2020 decadal survey. The main point: the study of nearby galaxies on a star-by-star basis has big implications that extend far beyond the nearby Universe. arxiv.org/abs/1901.07571
For example: SED-based interpretation of faint, distant galaxies relies on calibrations within the Local Group; nearby, low-mass galaxies are currently our only probe of the matter power spectrum on small scales and can tell us about the reionization era.
A key tool for this field is resolved color-magnitude diagrams because they allow us to reconstruct a galaxy's star formation rate over time. This is especially useful for nearby faint galaxies, as their progenitors were even lower luminosity & are probably invisible to us today.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 24, 2019
Thread. Scientific research has tremendous innate value, and detector development (and training of scientists/engineers) has clear and tangible contributions to the economy. At the same time, resources are not infinite.
There are lots of considerations here, not the least of which is that it's not possible to shelve an entire field for a decade (or longer) & expect it to pop back up when the time is right. People will move onto different careers or different applications; that loss is permanent.
But: it's not good enough to say 'trust us'. Make the case for future facilities, but it's not reasonable to assume that there will always be $ for the next desirable experiment. In the face of the unknown, it makes sense to take a step back and ask about the best approaches.
Read 5 tweets
Dec 3, 2018
OK, my people, time for the tweet storm you neither need nor deserve (nor want?), but that you’ll get anyway. It’s about the paper by T. Kelley (@UCIastro) out today on the arXiv; arxiv.org/abs/1811.12413
Once upon a time (~1999), the dark matter satellites expected to orbit around the Milky Way (MW) were missing.

Only 11 satellite galaxies were known, whereas simulations (Klypin ++, Moore ++) predicted 10-1000x more dark matter subhalos, depending on how one compared masses
Already by 2000, a likely candidate for their absence was proposed by @jbprime ++: cosmic reionization would impose a floor on galaxy formation and leave most of the "missing (dark matter) satellites" completely star-free.
Read 17 tweets

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