The end of my courageous science

What is the purpose of fundamental science? In my eyes to create a deeper understanding of Nature, to explore relations between phenomena in any possible way that yields new insights. On top, there are other issues to be taken into account, namely, can we afford to do this in the face of more pressing needs, for instance, looking at the increasing demands and costs in energy, and do we provide respectable (living) conditions for people doing research in academia to foster true progress and value the life time people invest in this quest? Here are answers I discovered on my journey.  

The astrophysical methods my colleagues and I have developed and tried to establish meet the first two criteria and I am very proud and happy that, even after 100 years of modern cosmology, big advancements can still be made in theory and methodology to increase our knowledge and save resources at the same time. Apart from that, the power of mathematics and human understanding allows us to delineate the scope of validity of our approach in an instant and reduce prerequisites to a necessary minimum. 

Yet, concerning the latter two questions, this is no endeavour one could achieve on a short-term contract. It also requires years of expertise in several fields, connecting the dots. At the early stages, it was a high-risk high-gain challenge of unknown outcome. People in my environment were sceptical, some even tried to deter me from pursuing that path and made me believe I was not clever enough to figure out anything. I better quit and left. Hence, I needed a lot of time to convince myself of the contrary and also spent several years working on it without payment and under non-supportive conditions. As the direction I pursued was the most reasonable idea I had ever come across, I always hoped my efforts would pay off and I would get the chance to turn my ideas into mainstream approaches because it would be to the advantage of the entire community and beyond. 

When I found solutions to problems a lot of people had hard times to solve but that were key for several projects, I thought I had proven myself worthy of being a peer. Instead of accepting me, I ran against a wall of silent people ignoring the results, or people being upset that I found a way to resolve issues they had been tackling for years with marginal success. One local colleague even accused me of having taken away a project for a new student -- which was not true as several students had been working on this and all struggled with the issue I had finally eliminated. In my eyes, I did them a favour and accelerated their progress. 

Maybe I was lucky, maybe it was my different viewing angle that brought me to all the solutions I found. No matter, there was no reason for anyone being upset because I always offered to join forces and I was there for students when they needed someone to talk, be it moral or scientific support. I invested part of my funding in the team when things were tight and engaged as much as I could to foster internal and international collaborations. 

The thing I didn't do was teaching in my spare time, which is often expected from postdocs. Doing that seriously is a full-time job for me and my contract was research only. As I didn't feel I could do a good teaching job and fulfil the grant goals, I focused on research. The dissemination of my results was slow and compared to the highly innovative research outcomes, I never was more than an average teacher even if I put all my energy into it. Evaluations for future grants, excellence of institutes, etc. require outstanding quality of research, so I published as many papers as I could, did outreach, and also offered to do a press release on a breakthrough result I had worked out with two colleagues (two fine men whose encouragement and collaboration I highly appreciate). The press office never sent a reply to my request and the text I had written never appeared. 

In 2020, I applied to the Prize for Courageous Science to have my research ideas evaluated independently and when I was honoured with the prize, my hopes raised that things would change. The minister appreciated my risk-taking and achievements in her laudatio. Amidst the pandemic with my grant running out and no prospects of new funding, as two further proposals had been rejected, I was relieved and felt a wave of support. It also seemed to motivate my colleagues working on similar things who fought for every cent like I did. I hoped they could also profit from the increased attention our way of understanding the cosmos received. 

The prize, however, only prologued my contract for a few months, while millions of Euros were invested into Artificial Intelligence. AI may be valuable for many applications but given the current climate crisis and most recent developments, some colleagues and I think we should not only promote computer-based progress in science, but also fund promising new methods in theory. The latter come at much lower costs and yield a kind of understanding only theory provides. This is why we have three pillars research is based on (identifying the "what?" in observations/experiments, answering "how?" with simulations, making sense of the "why?" by theory). 

The university I was working for didn't want to invest, either. I only received a letter thanking me for my award-winning work, but no funding for my projects to get me over the pandemic at least. Three letters of recommendations for me written by leaders in the field didn't make any difference. There was also no financial or other support for a cosmology conference I proposed to organise for the international community to come to town and collaborate after the pandemic. My hopes my local colleagues would finally accept my ideas were shattered. On the other hand, I could not remember a big cosmology conference being held during my time there, anyway and one major player in the field had left, too. 

Since August last year, I have been supported by unemployment subsidies but worked on my projects and raised more interest in the results by attending as many (costfree) online conferences as I could. A dear colleague of mine arranged for a NASA press release of our work, as we succeeded to analyse a phenomenon nobody else could have tackled because other approaches cannot cope with such sparse data. Besides, I solved the problem that the rejecting grant proposal reviewers deemed highly unlikely to be feasible, and applied to about 20 permanent positions unsuccessfully. 

Ten years after my PhD, having been shovelled around institutes (4 in the last 8 years) and worked for a lot of different people, there is nothing to gain from carrying my equations around the globe and live under conditions I suffer from, not being able to develop long-term plans or take part in larger projects without risking a lot of abandoned, unfinished work and responsibilities. Having worked in three different research fields, I have experienced many such examples and find them highly frustrating. The trend to an increasing through-put of people has worsened over the years leading to ever shorter life-cycles of common knowledge, shared programs, collaborations, and paper citations. Consequently, knowledge is lost, methods are re-invented many times, and some people lose motivation to go on when they realise that their idea was investigated decades ago and the results are even more general than their own. 

If we minimise investments in research, we should not be surprised if the outcomes are not as innovative, original, and excellent as hoped. If people offer financial support, they do this to serve their own purposes which may not align with ones own. On a national and higher level the latter causes uproar. On an individual level, both is well accepted. PhD and postdocs are put under stress and on a journey of a potpourri of projects. A significant amount of them works below the poverty line, earns money from other jobs and without perspectives to gain a more stable job or research portfolio out of the projects they do. Becoming a professor means stable conditions, but many of them have so much teaching, administration, and faculty duties that they are exhausted and only do little research. 

Why is there so much short-term, small funding for epsilon-variations of established work and so little sustainable money and support for "courageous science"? And why are there so few research professors on this planet, whose main duty is advancing science and training students on these methods?

During my eight years in cosmology, I met a lot of people, among them influential leaders of the field. Some did not comment on my approaches at all despite several attempts to get some feedback, others helped with ideas, promoted papers, etc. and encouraged me to continue. But down the line, nobody put a job offer on the table that clearly showed that they considered my ideas worth continuing and becoming a valuable and long-term part of the community. Postdoc job, teaching job? Anywhere, anytime, but no sincere commitment to actually make something out of the ideas I cared about and wanted to disseminate. 

True, I have worked pro bono for a long time and cosmology is the most important thing in my life. Nevertheless, I do not see any sense in taking on short-term jobs around the world at salaries that hardly make ends meet to fulfil other people's milestones without getting an inch closer to my own goals. From my experiences, such work hardly generates sustainable merit and progress, anyway. Moreover, if I continued on short-term funding, my projects would not be taken as seriously as they would be having a permanent job and being able to establish a research group out of a secured and stable position. 

Including my PhD and everything I did since then, one could say that half a million Euros was wasted and more than ten of the best years of my life went by, pursuing a fruitless endeavour. My research line which yields an encompassing, connected web of results has led to

• an unprecedently efficient approach to analyse strong gravitational lenses, 
• a mathematical derivation of all possible degeneracies that can occur in single-lens-plane strong lensing, 
• a theoretical derivation of one of the most prominent mass density profiles used to describe dark matter halos, and, most recently, 
• to a resolution to the Hubble-constant tension. 

This is where my journey comes to an end. I decided to leave academia to earn my living with people who make a big step towards me to provide me the conditions under which we will all receive the best results. 

I do not want to further support this international system in which many people cannot perform at their best and complain behind closed doors fearing they may worsen the situation for themselves. Hardly anybody stands up and at least tries to make a change for the better. I did and failed, as others have before me, be it to ask for funding and conditions to truly make progress, be it for the research direction I am pursuing which still has received much less acceptance than mainstream methods. Hopefully, there will come a time for future generations when science is more open-minded and pursued in a less exploitative and more sustainable way again. I regret that I was born either to late or too early to enjoy that experience.

Image credits: Google Hangouts