How I Defended a PhD Thesis (A Story about Preserving One’s Views)

The article thoroughly describes and analyzes my experience of being a PhD student in philosophy of physics abroad, interesting by its interlingual, interdisciplinary and international aspectsб but also by the evolution of the relationships of the PhD student with the supervisor which raises plenty of descriptive and normative questions related to research. In the first part of the article, the description proceeds in an autobiographical manner. The supervisor was first impressed by my capacities, but then got annoyed by my topic change, my independence and my proof for the new topic. In response I elaborated the preconditions of the proof by myself, tested my results at a major conference and obtained a second place at a competition for my article about them. I thus managed to defend the PhD thesis and to keep normal relationships with the supervisor, by contrast to the comparable story of Hugh Everett who left academia. In the second part of the article, an analysis of both organizational and individual sides of this experience is provided in the same chronological order. On the one hand, I address the material thematically, covering such aspects as interdisciplinarity, international moves and research visits, the roles of conferences, competitions and societies, as well as publication models and PhD defenses. On the other hand, I also return to major themes from the autobiography, such as the change of my research topic, the creation and fate of my writings and the evolution of the supervisor’s attitude towards my key result (the proof). Details on my research and the nature of our controversy about the proof are presented. I end up with revisiting the strategy of my relationships with the supervisor in light of examples from the history of physics (Everett’s story again, but now also Utiyama’s case with Yang and Mills).