The value of a work

A piece of work is an abstract concept which we handle with more or less expertise. It's kind of driven by the supply and demand law, as any other object (concrete or abstract), and speculation might have a turn in its value as well. So, how do you appraise it??

Well before I graduated as a physicist, I had a casual chat with a friend and colleague at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The talk was on mathematical models for locust scourges and I digressed up to raise and fall apart of languages. This chat became, one and a half years latter, my thesis degree on the coexistence and competition among languages in a same region. Great!!

The price of a work is mainly crap and must be strongly renormalized before someone loses its head. Like a stone in go game, its value depends on the coordinates in which the stone is played, both spatial and temporal.

I was pretty proud of my thesis. It was not only the scientific job, but I'd also learnt a lot together with my mentor about how many random circumstances could devaluate a work well done (not necessarily talking about mine). Together with my thesis they followed: a participation in an international conference, prizes... a lot of stuff. I was never sure that I deserved what it was told about me, nor about my work. None of the recognitions. I went to Berlin with the idea of further researching, trying out my fitness to science and I found emptiness. Though (still do) about withdrawing from research.

Now, back in Galicia for vacation, I visited my former mentor and felt again what I enjoyed that much: the scientific chat about new problems, the maths puzzling me on the train joining the cities of Compostela and Coruña. The origins!! And when I came back home and checked on my single paper up to date, I discovered the greatest reward I could ever dream of!! I felt for first time in a while fulfilled (scientifically). Someone, without any further references to us, just by a daily reading of papers from arXiv, decided that ours was one of the bests new ideas and decided to post it in a blog. It also happens that the blog is held by people from MIT, how unexpected!!!

So I don't know yet what value a research might be worth. I worked into this project so many years ago and as a graduate student and I still get benefits from it. On the other hand, I rot in Berlin solving pointless arithmetical exercises and well far away from any real research project. Although I would devote my time to it, I don't have the feeling that this has any worth at all... Just as in Go game: each and every minute or stone so alike; played at a single space-time coordinate each of them becomes, one by one, the whole or the void.