The Application of Quantum Theory to Explain the Effects of Various Management Practices on Basic Research
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The Application of Quantum Theory to Explain the Effects of Various Management Practices on Basic Research Management of research involves myriad functions of nonresearch character that nevertheless influence the enterprise greatly. They generally fall in one of two categories: the organization of the process and the evaluation of its results. Over much of the past half century, the management was benevolent and the managers enlightened, for the most part. Of late, pressures beyond the control of our benefactors and beyond the scope of this article have mitigated in favor of bruteforce one-size-fits-all organization and evaluation criteria.1 What the perpetrators of this change have overlooked is the fundamental stochastic nature of basic research 2 and the miraculous way it mimics a quantized system of weakly interacting researchers. First let's look at the impact of organizational overlays on research. The least visionary approach to organization relies on categorization. If a project doesn't fit neatly into a well-defined category, well separated from all others, it will disappear. Quantum confinement forces projects out of the continuum of creative research into the well-separated, very stationary states of deep potential wells. Some hybridization of orbitals may contribute to short-range mingling among researchers, but as any researcher worth her wave function knows, the broader the width of her state, the shorter lived it will be. Worse yet, just as the real component of the phase of any wave function damps its expanse, the injection of reality requirements into research agenda severely hampers tunneling exchanges among neighboring disciplinary potential wells. Evaluation of research has quantum consequences too. We know some jobs are done better than others. We would prefer that those working for us do good jobs. We ought to have a way to determine how well a job is done. That seems trivially obvious if we're repairing the kitchen sink, building a bridge on time and on budget, or rescuing the citizenry of a distant land from famine and pestilence. But scientific research is a different story. Asking a basic researcher how his particular project will
contribute to industrial competitiveness, national security, quality of life, etc., is like asking one gas molecule when and how much it plans to contribute to a vessel's pressure on its next collision with a wall. Worse yet, as we all know, the act of measurement alters the system being measured. The research project that had been going along nicely as a linear combination of its chosen basis states is forced into an eigenstate of the joint research-plus-evaluation system, distorting its original intent and misleading evaluators. Only a dwindling number of hidden variables, otherwise known as discretionary funds, are left to preserve the essential nature of pure inquiry in the face of a not-so-hidden political agenda of this generation of demanding benefactors. Faced with an impossible task, evaluators use short-term anecdotal second guessing or, in quantum par
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