Today (and the next time in this series on duality), I explain the most interesting insight that I have gotten from string theory about black holes.

What is on the mind of all the physicists all over the world right now? Quantum Gravity? Global warming? No. It is the same that is on the mind of all the other scientists in academia, too. Impact factor (IF)! How can I get my name on a paper into a high IF journal – that is the question. Publish Or Perish – POP science, popular science.

Welcome back to my series of posts on China, written from my point of view, a Westerner working at Nanjing University (NJU). Since China becomes ever more important also for academia and science, I would like to provide some insight into difficulties that are not widely mentioned. The last time I started with the language barrier, and there were many points that need to be explained further.

No, the following does not belong into the humor section, because I know of people who made a career with the method described below. This is serious! This is another article in my series on the usual cheating in science.

POP-science culture (POP = publish or perish = popular) ensures that only publications count in academia. Successful grant applications also count, but the grant you get only if you have many publications. And “friends” count, which you get with coauthoring and publications. And all that impacts science – no conspiracy theory necessary here. This is science today:

Duality is one of the most important insights in physics and philosophy of physics. What does duality mean? It means that there are dual descriptions of one and the same observed physics. Duality implies that you cannot possibly decide whether the one description T or the other, to T dual description T’ is right or wrong, because both descriptions lead to the exact same observations for the observers who live in a universe that can be described by the theories T and T’. Both are equally right or wrong, as they are dual descriptions.