<story><title>The Sad Story of Heisenberg&apos;s Doctoral Oral Exam (1998)</title><url>https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199801/heisenberg.cfm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>erikpukinskis</author><text>This highlights what was a huge misconception for me about a PhD. I thought a PhD was about making an original contribution to my field. I thought Academia was a place where you took risks in pursuit of knowledge, and a PhD was your first real go at it.&lt;p&gt;In retrospect (I&amp;#x27;m a PhD dropout) the PhD is really more about training in the fundamentals of scholarship. It&amp;#x27;s about building up background knowledge, and learning the mechanics of research and publishing.&lt;p&gt;The actual scholarly contribution matters &lt;i&gt;almost not at all&lt;/i&gt;. This is why faculty will pressure you to pick a conservative project... the results are besides the point. The point is demonstrating that you can do all the steps. Because lots of great people can only do half the steps. A PhD means you can do all.&lt;p&gt;Once you have your PhD, then its your career on the line and you can do whatever you want. Before that point, you&amp;#x27;re really working on borrowed (from your advisor) time, and as much as it might seem like you are supposed to blaze a path, they really just want you to show that you can walk in a straight line.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Sad Story of Heisenberg&apos;s Doctoral Oral Exam (1998)</title><url>https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199801/heisenberg.cfm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>A reassuring story for those of us who feel we are strong in many areas but fear we have deep, dangerous holes in certain fundamentals.&lt;p&gt;This vignette explains part of something I hadn&amp;#x27;t understood about the emergence of Heisenberg&amp;#x27;s work (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Werner_Heisenberg#Matrix_mechanics_and_the_Nobel_Prize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Werner_Heisenberg#Matrix_mecha...&lt;/a&gt; ): he seemed to work out the core theory of QM without really developing a sensible, general approach.  Compare this to Newton, who did develop calculus to explain mechanics (even if we these days use Leibniz&amp;#x27;s contemporaneous work).  In Heisenberg&amp;#x27;s case, Born was the one who realized that we should use matrices.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s still weird that Born didn&amp;#x27;t get the nobel for this work and had to wait 20 more years to get one.</text></comment>