Spain?

Ok, as I said earlier, I had an interview in Madrid last Monday. The interview went pretty well, so I decided to go there (after the trip, indeed). I'll be doing a PhD on turbulent combustion (how sexy...). The position is at CIEMAT, madrid, and is part of the MyPlanet project.

Ok, that was boring, so let's know recall the three fundamental laws of mechanics. I might want to keep these in mind...

First Law

A grad student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it.

This postulate is known as the " Law of Inertia" and was originally discovered experimentally by Galileo four years before Newton was born when he threatened to cut his grad student's funding. This resulted in a quickening of the student's research progress.

Galileo's observations were later perfected by Descartes through the application of "Weekly Meetings."

Before Galileo's time, it was wrongfully thought that grad students would rest only as long as no work was required of them and that in the absence of external forces, they would graduate by themselves.

First published in 1679, Isaac Newton's "Procrastinare Unnaturalis Principia Mathematica" is often considered one of the most important single works in the history of science. Its Second Law is the most powerful of the three, allowing mathematical calculation of the duration of a doctoral degree.

Second Law

The age, a, of a doctoral process is directly proportional to the flexibility, f, given by the advisor and inversely proportional to the student's motivation, m.

Mathematically, this postulate translates to:

agePhD=flexibility/motivation

a=F/m

So, F=ma

This Law is a quantitative description of the effect of the forces experienced by a grad student. A highly motivated student may still remain in grad school given enough flexibility. As motivation goes to zero, the duration of the PhD goes to infinity.

Having postulated the first two Laws of Graduation, Isaac Newton the grad student was still perplexed by this paradox: If indeed the first two Laws accounted for the forces which delayed graduation, why doesn't explicit awareness of these forces allow a grad student to graduate?

It is believed that Newton practically abandoned his graduate research in Celestial Mechanics to pursue this paradox and develop his Third Law.

Third Law

For every action towards graduation there is an equal and opposite distraction.

This Law states that, regardless of the nature of the interaction with the advisor, every force for productivity acting on a grad student is accompanied by an equal and opposing useless activity such that the net advancement in these progress is zero.

Newton's Laws of Graduation were ultimately shown to be an approximation of the more complete description of Graduation Mechanics given by Einstein's Special Theory of Research Inactivity.

Einstein's theory, developed during his graduate work in Zurich, explains the general phenomena that, relative to the grad student, time slows down to nearly a standstill.

PS : eventhough you could probably find this pretty much everywhere (even at George's), the real PhD student - thx Seb - would advise to go visit PhDcomics... the source of the best comics strips (private joke).