[ih] PhD

[Alex McKenzie]

 Jack,
For networking, I think there are a number of key principles exposed in John Day's book " Patterns in Network Architecture"
For Computer Science, I don't know.
Cheers,Alex

    On Sunday, January 3, 2021, 2:58:31 PM EST, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 
On 1/3/21 10:12 AM, Joseph Touch via Internet-history wrote:
> It’s less common as a field matures, 
I think this observation is key -- "Computer Science" is far from being
mature.  IMHO, it's still somewhere in the spectrum between Art and
Engineering.  

When I was in grad school at MIT, I remember asking my advisor about
investing several more years to get a PhD in the then-new curriculum of
Computer Science.    His observation was that PhDs tend to produce
experts in some very narrow specialization, and also provide credentials
useful for attracting venture capital to found companies.   In contrast,
MS work tends to create professionals with much broader interests and
ability to explore outside of their academic focus.   I interpreted
this: PhDs think and discover scientific principles; MSes build stuff.

Since I was most interested in "building stuff that people actually use"
(what I told my high school adviser), I took the MS route.   This was
apparently pretty common at the time (an immature field).  There's an
interesting summary here of the experience at Harvard, and its ties to
The Internet:

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born

I've asked the question before, but never gotten any answers -- after
50+ years of Computer Science, what are the top few most important
Scientific Principles that have been discovered - analogous to Maxwell's
Equations, or Einstein's, etc?  Same question for the subfield of
Computer Networking.

IMHO, we won't have a Science until we know those Principles that tell
us how to use computers in ways that don't require constant updates to
fix critical flaws, or enable branches of governments or high school
script kiddies to engage in cyberwarfare, or subject all of us to spam,
phishing, viruses, identity theft, and other such nasties of computer
life today.

There's now over 50 years of operational experience with computers and
networks.  The "Internet Experiment" continues.   Perhaps some current
PhD candidates can extract some Scientific Principles from all that
experimentation and tell the next generation of builders how to make
things better.

/Jack Haverty



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