午夜福利1000集合

THE best bits of being a particle cosmologist are the moments where I feel the mathematical pieces of an idea click into place. When I understand an equation or successfully solve one, I have the same experience I had over 30 years ago when I was learning my times tables. It is a unique kind of elation.

I realise that a lot of people have never had this experience. I write this column especially for those of you who were discouraged because I know that whether or not you love most people are interested in the universe beyond their everyday lives. We are by nature a curious species.

Curiosity remains important for a scientist, but it has to be paired with persistence to become competent at what we do. The universe is complex and exceedingly difficult to understand. At some point, even for the quickest among us, the solutions we seek are far from obvious. Stephen Hawking never resolved the question of what happens at the centre of a black hole. His description of this problem in an Errol Morris documentary is what inspired me as a child to commit my life to particle physics and cosmology. I have been lucky to be able to spend my time thinking about these questions and get paid for it.

Unfortunately, too little of my day job involves thinking about these questions. Or at least that is how I feel in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic and the aftermath of academia being transformed by cuts in public funding for higher education. On the day I turned this column in, I spent 3 hours figuring out how to activate a type of online survey called a student evaluation of teaching (SET). Colleagues will know that the intensity with which I went at this is particularly ironic, given the extensive literature showing that SETs are fraught with bias, with women of colour like me on the losing end.

This is supposed to be someone else鈥檚 job. I don鈥檛 mean to say that the work is beneath me. I mean more that I don鈥檛 have the expertise with the tools required to make these surveys, and I have an array of other tasks that actually are my job. In the language of my workplace, today I experienced an administrative burden that became a barrier to me conducting my instructional duties. Which is to say, there are student emails with questions about astrophysics 鈥� one of my areas of expertise 鈥� that have gone unanswered because I was too busy figuring out how to ask the students how they rated me.

鈥淎cademics now have less time to investigate the big questions and to pass on our knowledge鈥�

This sort of thing sabotages the scientific enterprise, reducing the amount of time we get to do what we trained for: investigating big questions and passing on our knowledge to the next generation. Academic work requires a community of labourers, from the people who pick up our rubbish and clean our toilets to the administrators who are tasked with helping us with paperwork. The whole thing falls apart when staff are downsized or asked to cut their hours, leading to a loss of both income and essential benefits for them. Without administrative staff to help us manage that load, teaching and research staff 鈥� the majority of whom are term-to-term appointees with no semblance of job stability 鈥� do more and more of the work, squeezing our other responsibilities and commitments.

These changes in academia in response to economic and political pressures are but one example of the social challenges that make it difficult to sustain a focus on the beautiful mysteries of the universe.

Within US universities and beyond, too many workers are earning too little, with insufficient benefits. Our social safety net is in tatters. While the UK still has a better health system than we do, I鈥檓 not sure for how long. And I see that many couple of weeks to protest pay and working conditions.

Our nations share in common a crisis of failing and absent support at government level for refugees and other immigrants, leading to tragic outcomes. Politicians claim we can鈥檛 afford to make room for them. Meanwhile, I pay a bigger percentage of my income in taxes than billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

In the context of our unnecessarily dehumanising social structures, my admin burden might seem insignificant. But I鈥檓 talking about the same thing: political structures that shift money away from important community activities and into the pockets of billionaires while devaluing our humanity, our work and our right to experience and share wonder. I want better for us.

I continue to hope for a world where strangers in a strange land are always warmly embraced and can find community in a shared curiosity about the universe beyond our atmosphere.