Academia and Science During the COVID19 Global Pandemic

I've thought about creating a blog website for a really long time. It got started around 2012 - 2013 when I was still in the middle of my undergraduate studies in science and engineering. I had stumbled upon a blog called 'Apes in Elysium', and the writing style was excellent. A resonating excerpt, which I was able to hang on to after the blog eventually disappeared, appears below:

Ultimately, life is a joke. It's absurd. But in a good way. You'll be dead one day, and the only things you've ultimately evolved to do are Fuck and Shit and Piss and Eat in the service of passing on nucleic acids. No matter what happens, no matter what you do, learn, or believe, death will wipe the slate clean, and all of this will be nullified in the crushing emptiness of the ineluctable void. The afterlife is a delusion. You will not be punished for eating pork or masturbating or thinking impure thoughts or conjugating genitals with someone who isn't under a state-sanctioned, church-approved contract with you. The Universe doesn't give a shit what you do with your day. When you're laying in a coffin you will have no consciousness of anything you have achieved or left behind, including your children and the possessions you have accumulated. And you will be forgotten sooner than you think. Your children move on and focus on their lives and struggles; they die, their children grow up, and they die; the wheel of life and death doesn’t stop for anyone. Somewhere a clock is ticking...

Of course, life often gets in the way, and it's taken me until 2020 to create this website, no doubt a result of my recently acquired COVID19 'free-time' or more aptly, pandemic induced joblessness. Since then, I have completed my PhD in condensed matter physics and learned a lot about the process of conducting research in academia. A lot of it isn't what I expected, in the sense that I was outright disappointed (and on several occasions, enraged) with the entire experience. But having been finally accepted by my scientific peers into the physics PhD fraternity and having closed that chapter, I've sought to initiate a new beginning of sorts into the world of science.

There is so much that we don't understand about the world around us. I began to really understand this when I began my PhD research. It seemed that where ever I cared to look, I saw something that either no one else had seen or done, or that no one else could explain. The feeling of discovery is certainly addictive, and what probably keeps PhDs moving into postdocs to some extent (they sure don't do it for the money). Nonetheless, my own transition from PhD to postdoc has been hampered by the COVID19 virus that is currently ravaging most of the world. Academia is tough; academia during a pandemic - doubly so. Which is really bad news for academia, which has been an international effort for quite some time. In fact, one can look back at Lord Kelvin's Jubilee (https://www.nature.com/articles/054173e0), recorded in 1896 by A. Gray:

The University of Glasgow is honoured by the presence to-day of many distinguished visitors from foreign countries,  from America,  from India,  from Australia, and from all parts of the United Kingdom. Names of men renowned for their scientific work in distant countries have been added to our list of honorary graduates...

I have had addresses also from my old Japanese students of Glasgow University, now professors in the University of Tokio, or occupying posts in the Civil Service and Engineering Service of Japan,  for which I thank them heartily. I wish particularly also to thank my Baltimore coefficients for their address. They have been useful to myself in my own keen endeavour unsuccessful, I must say-nevertheless keen-to know some- thing about the true dynamics of light and ether and crystals.

One even more notable (at least to the public) scientist, Charles Darwin, who completed his work "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, was only able to do so by travelling the world. So even as far back as the 1800's, science and international travel have been intimately intertwined. In academia, PhD students have been 'traded' between professors, and this is observable in the Noble Laureate record, in which many physicists who won the prize, were supervised by others who had won the prize, or at least, were in communication with other notable scientists (see, for example, the fantastic procrastination website https://academictree.org/physics/tree.php?pid=757519).

The continued inability to travel and attend workshops, conferences or leave on sabbatical is sure to have a significant short term effect on academia. In addition, local lock-downs and quarantine measures have decreased the number of scientists able to even conduct work in laboratories, with many institutions running something akin to a 'skeleton crew'. The other side to this mess is that a lot of funding at the universities in the Western world was generated by swathes of international students (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7372729/ , https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-020-00821-4 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_science_and_technology).

It is difficult right now to understand how quickly international travel will become easy again, or when lock-downs and quarantine measures will by lifted. As an 'early career researcher', it is worrying to graduate into such a destitute and uncertain job market. I am hopeful that the situation will change for the better in the next year, but until then, many will just have to wait it out.