Astronomers have gotten pretty worked up lately about what they see as a serious criticism of the way they do business – a paper published last spring by Simon White, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. The paper is called ‘Fundamentalist physics: Why dark energy is bad for astronomy’ and as soon as White started circulating it among the physics and astronomy community, sparks started to fly. (Nature article here, subscription required)

I have to say that I’ve had a hard time getting worked up about the White paper. Basically he’s saying that certain work practices that are common in high-energy physics are threatening the very foundation of astronomy today. These are practices such as creating massive collaborations of coauthors to work on projects, like those needed at detectors at particle accelerators. According to White, astronomy is in danger of moving in the same direction – building giant facilities for doing astronomical research that will consume the creativity of individual scientists. There’s a lot more to his argument than that, but I’d refer you to his paper for the gorey details.

Anyway, last night came a much-ballyhooed ‘debate’ between White and cosmologist Rocky Kolb of the University of Chicago who has written in response to the White work. In my opinion, the debate ended up being a lot of griping about the nature of large collaborations and large facilities, and a lot of worrying about whether young astronomers are being driven away from the field because they don’t want to be the 300th coauthor on a massive paper.

Are you an astronomer? How are important are such working conditions to you? Or do you think creativity will win the day no matter what you’re working on – that there is plenty of good science to be done even under the framework of a massive, faceless machine?