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CREDENTIALS_FREEMAN_DYSON

                                             October 24, 2015
                                             November 6, 2015

                                                         CREDENTIALS  

Consider the case of Freeman Dyson.
                                                              DYSON
If you survey his career, you can see he's a very             FREEMAN_DOWN
important physicist who did quite a lot of impressive
work without first earning a PhD, though since then, he's                             
certainly been awarded honorary degrees, e.g. I've seen a          [LINK]

I remember Dyson commenting in some of his popular writing
that he didn't think anyone could do what he did today:
the system of credentials has become too rigid for someone
like himself to slip through it. It is not abundantly clear to
me that this is a Good Thing.

But then Rod Adams certainly has a point that when you
represent yourself as a physicist, to *most people* it
probably does suggest that you've earned a PhD from an
accredited institution.

And even to me, calling yourself a physicist implies that
you've done some actual work in the field, that you've
tried to advance the state-of-the-art. Freeman Dyson back
in 1949 did some very significant work on the foundations
of Quantum Electrodynamics. And even if you're not up at
Freeman Dyson's level, I'd expect that if you call
yourself a physicist you'd be someone publishing in
reputable physics journals, which is not something that
Lovins seems to do very often.






                                                                            
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