Access to information and social support/reinforcement is a huge limiting factor.
Access to labs, equipment, technicians, funding is an even greater factor. Only mathematicians can really afford to work from home. (And now, computer scientists and computational-xxx people have joined them.)
It’s not quite so dire. You can’t do experiments from home usually, but you can interpret experiments from home thanks to Internet publication of results. So a lot of theoretical work in almost every field can be done from outside academia.
Yes, but in most fields someone can’t participate by only interpreting experiments from home. It’s useful, but you can’t build a career from it. Normally you really want to also be able to influence experiments in the lab to get the new data you want.
Access to labs, equipment, technicians, funding is an even greater factor. Only mathematicians can really afford to work from home. (And now, computer scientists and computational-xxx people have joined them.)
Yes, all my predictions about people working at home should be interpreted to refer to fields in which that is physically possible.
(In fact, in these discussions I am pretty much always thinking specifically of mathematics, and possibly the most theoretical kinds of physics.)
It’s not quite so dire. You can’t do experiments from home usually, but you can interpret experiments from home thanks to Internet publication of results. So a lot of theoretical work in almost every field can be done from outside academia.
Yes, but in most fields someone can’t participate by only interpreting experiments from home. It’s useful, but you can’t build a career from it. Normally you really want to also be able to influence experiments in the lab to get the new data you want.