Aw, man. This essay gives me some perspective. I ended up hating physics by the time I got my bachelor’s in it. I remember junior year they said, we know you’re confused, you haven’t actually learned REAL physics yet, that’s what grad school is for. And most of you won’t be accepted, and of those who are, most won’t become professors even if you want to.
I figured a physics degree would allow me to get a good job, but then they said, sure, if you want to do finance, defense, or education. What?! The first two were pretty nauseating so I decided to do a year-long internship at various local public schools, and realized that I hated that too. (More the bureaucracy than the actual teaching aspect.) My school basically expected you’d double major in math or CS, so they often didn’t teach a lot of the fundamental techniques you needed, assuming you knew it already. I also learned that while my high school had done a great job teaching me English and history, the math department was not quite up to snuff comparatively, and I felt behind my classmates about “fundamentals” like linear algebra, which they had somehow been taught in high school. Sure, I knew Shakespeare a lot better than them, and even minored in literature in college (maybe biting off more than I could chew) but that clearly didn’t impress them. Why waste your time with old books when you could be making money! It definitely brought me down a notch and made me feel dumb, but I also realized college wasn’t a place for someone to learn lots of different things, but to focus on one area instead. I ended up becoming a bartender and I’m very happy with that decision. At least, once things are back to normal, hopefully within the next few months. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it
I look back on college, and so many classes seemed like a waste of time. I understand a well rounded education, but so many classes seemed like fluff. I once took a Abnormal Psychology class. It sounded interesting being premed. For half a year we sat in a circle, and talked about feelings. I was so shy that was the last place I would open up. I used to think, If I was honest, I would admit I was still a virgin, and had a deathly fear of public speaking. I loved the teacher though. She really meant well.
If I had a kid, I would supplement his education. I would make sure he knew mathematics well. I also think physics should be taught much earlier, along with the finance, and the markets. As a kid, I was interested in woodworking, cars, engines, even electricity, but the teachers had us coloring world maps?
>>> My school basically expected you’d double major in math or CS, so they often didn’t teach a lot of the fundamental techniques you needed, assuming you knew it already.
Indeed, it was some decades ago, but at my college, there was substantial overlap between the requirements for the math and physics majors, to the point where just a few additional credits got you both. And it was a time when CS was still being taught in math departments at some colleges, so there were courses that you could take for either CS or math credit.
I actually came from the other direction, started as a math major and added physics, which I then studied in grad school.
In my view the affinity between physics and programming (and electronics) is no accident. Physics was computational before the computer age. We ran out of problems that could be solved in "closed" form, early in the 20th century. The Manhattan Project employed a staff of "computers" who performed calculations on mechanical calculators and punch card machines. Scientific programming predates the software industry. Today, virtually every scientific instrument is computerized, every experiment is automated. My PhD thesis experiment ran on thousands of lines of code.
Every physics student learned to program. What they didn't do is pay attention to turning us necessarily into good programmers. Since I didn't take any CS courses, I had to pick that stuff up on my own, and have continued working on improving my programming technique to this day.
> My school basically expected you’d double major in math or CS
Coding knowledge is becoming a matter of literacy for more and more professions, so it might be worth trying to pick up a bit of it before it's too late - lockdown might be an especially good time.
My whole childhood and young life I wanted to go into physics academia. I wanted to have influence - to push the boundaries of science. I had an idyllic view of this purely meritocratic system where people were paid to explore. My first year of undergrad utterly destroyed this notion. I left as soon as I had my bachelors degree. I knew what would await me in grad and post grad work and I'd seen post docs cry after endless work for grants. I wanted financial freedom and happiness, and that eventually won over pushing the boundaries of science. So sorry young me - I quit too.
> I'd seen post docs cry after endless work for grants.
People knock the recent Alien films but you know the scene where the android is leading the team through a theater of charred bodies and you think "holy shit, this is a HINT, how do you not see it?"
Well, when I got home, I realized that the disgruntled postdocs around me -- some of whom were smarter and worked harder than me and still got thrown out like so much trash because their thesis didn't pan out -- were also a HINT. How did I not see it before?
Thanks, Prometheus. You weren't a great movie, but you had a very important impact on my life.
I finished my physics degree in the early 90's, and went straight into industry. At the time, we all knew about the problem of producing more PhDs than could possibly all get academic jobs. We called it "the lie" and "the birth control problem." My dad said it was the same in the 1950s when he got his degree.
We pursue the degree for deep personal reasons that are hard to discourage, even in the face of harsh economic reality.
I did a back of envelope calculation based on the number of grad students, the number of post-docs, their duration, etc., and concluded that I would need to be a superstar to ever get tenure. And I was not a superstar. On the other hand I've had a good career in industry, with no regrets. I live in a nice town, and rarely have to work long hours.
I was extremely lucky that both of my parents are industrial scientists, so I knew there was an honorable alternative to being a professor. The only hitch is that my own professors in physics could encourage my change of plan, but had no idea how to help me pursue it. I guessed correctly that computer programming would be important. ;-)
While I was not a research superstar, I was very good at making complicated machines work for other people. That's what I do today.
"I had an idyllic view of this purely meritocratic system where people were paid to explore."
I feel like our society and schooling really pushes the idyllic visions of things as well as the idea of strict meritocracy. I feel like this has left many of us jaded when we realize much of what we were told as we grew up were only half-truths concealing a bleak reality from us, and in some cases dooming us to self-inflicted issues like the one's described in the article.
I can understand the pain of leaving that dream, but in a way, a tainted soil is rarely a good dream anyway.
I so wish I could do beautiful coding work but societies are not aligned with beauty (even at zero cost) so i'm bailing toward financial independance and peace of mind. Hopefully you and I can make time to join club or do thinking on our own terms.
I think this is a problem for any "deep" occupation which can't readily be measured by immediate financial benefit.
If I look around me, I can identify only a very few who are paid a living wage to do a) a thing that they enjoy that b) doesn't have a direct, immediate benefit to others.
It's not just physicists, it's theorists of all kinds, the arts, history, and yes, underwater basket weaving too.
Still my favorite essay I've ever read on the experience of grad school, five years after publication. Of course I've never been to grad school, although if I were to go it'd be in physics (try reading Anathem without wanting to drop everything and get a PhD in physics afterward, I challenge you).
I've spent the past decade or so living frugally & working in big tech. I now have enough saved up that I can conceivably work on a couple contracts a year then spend the rest of the time working on whatever I want. I think I know enough to do useful, interesting things in computer science without going to grad school. So that's one path I can take. The other would be to go to grad school for physics, but able to maintain greater material comfort than the author of this piece - and having already made peace with the end of a burning desire to shake the world. I wonder whether those two things would make a difference to my experience.
Unless a degree in physics would be useful on your current path in Big Tech, I'd recommend staying in your current career and keeping physics as a passionate hobby.
It is not at all necessary to go to graduate school to immerse yourself in physics. A Deepdyve subscription will expose most of the literature.
Do as they do in England, "read" physics. It is a never ending joy for me.
Having to do physics to earn a living from it diminishes the joy, because you have to do what others want you to do and not follow your own course.
"Still my favorite essay I've ever read on the experience of grad school, five years after publication."
Not all grad school is like this. It varies greatly by subjects and also by degree level. For example, a Master's degree can be easily attainable through night school while working. Education PhDs have their own challenges, but it usually doesn't resemble the types of questions and struggles the author describes about physics.
This resonated with me pretty hard. Despite starting as a nuke e, I figured very quickly that the situation was rather grim, so I got my BS in physics, with a ton of credits in related math, computer science, and some other hard sciences for giggles. All the time, though, I kept my eyes peeled.
What I saw was some very intelligent people whose hard work, creativity, and genius I admired making very little money, scavenging for grants like jackals, their spouses working second jobs, their clothing a little worn, their cars breaking down even as they labored over Big Issues. That is the payoff?
I did not pursue it any further. Yes, the degree itself impresses people (sometimes more than really necessary, is my feeling), and it certainly primes you to be able to switch gears for entirely different frameworks, but it has opened doors.
Meanwhile, I occasionally look at the odd paper, sniff around. For strings (oh, not strings, superstrings) (oh, not superstrings, M-theory) it's all out of my league, but not so much so I cannot feel the shape of things and just how far they are from being more than just very abstract mathematical constructs. "Fiber bundles," exactly how many strings and shiny hag-stones are we out on that particular Glass Bead Game?
I accept the possibility that the universe may simply be too difficult, on a mathematical level, for mere humans to understand. It could happen. On the other hand, I suspect that the development of mathematical models of physical phenomena without frequent touching of the "real world," fumbling for guideposts, why, you could very well wander off into a paper map of your own creation, unrelated to the world you wanted to explain.
> too difficult, on a mathematical level, for mere humans to understand.
to me the current situation looks similar to when we were building more and more complex combinations of epicycles in order to more and more precisely model the "Sun and the planets rotating around the Earth". Similarly we have right now a couple of dogmas, like say Copenhagen interpretation and the recently emerged dark matter, which while not confirmed by experiments yet can't be questioned (classic sign of dogma) and as a result the science resources are available only for the complex epicycle constructs based on those dogmas.
Why three dimensions? There's so much deep math and physics and even philosophy around the abstractions of what's a measurement, what's an observation, what is information, what is communication, what is the direction of time, etc. I keep thinking that could eventually lead to a completion of an understanding of reality when proved deep enough. But why three dimensions? It seems so arbitrary in the context of everything else. But there has to be a reason.
You can have as high of an ideal as you want about physics, quantum gravity, Einstein, Feynman, and hard work, but you should at least be aware when you start to abuse yourself in the name of this ideal. Fifteen hour days in the library? Reading paper after paper while ignoring the feeling you don't have a direction? These are moments where self-empathy can go a long way. And the more you dig into your ideals the less of a pedestal you put them on, and you can see them more clearly as they really are, and as human. Einstein was very close-minded about physics in his late career. Feynman was brilliant but also said a lot of other things other than "Shut up and calculate", which, by the way, the context of which is "eventually you just have to shut up an calculate" (from one of his books I believe). Quantum gravity isn't the only deep mystery in physics. And why does glory always seem to the main motivation for pursuing quantum gravity?
> "But in the end, I never knew what I was looking for and I didn’t find it."
To me it felt like you were looking for meaning and purpose in quantum gravity and its (mis-)characterization as the Grail, or at least in the process of working on quantum gravity. But it seemed like it was difficult to admit to yourself that it wasn't working, which ultimately makes the going even tougher.
I'm in a physics phd right now and I see this disconnect in myself and in other academics a lot.
I think what the author is missing here is how does he define "succeeding" in the field. It sounds like for himself anything short of "theory of everything" is failure, but for others, finishing a PhD is success. So on his terms for himself, terms even his advisor is way short of that goal. Heck, even Einstein was. But then he sees others just completing an arbitrary thesis and thinks of them as the successful ones. The author has just failed to reconcile his expectations and hopes of himself with what he's seeing others do.
In other words, I think even if the author had "succeeded" to the point of being top in his class and exceeding the research output of his advisor, he'd still be unhappy, still consider himself unsuccessful. Opting out was probably the best decision he could have made, and his life is probably more productive thereby. And heck, maybe he even still has a better chance of finding some theory of everything via some analogy he comes across in his day to day work than by a life of research in "fiber bundles".
I last read this article before I started grad school (in computer science). I'm reading it again, now, more than two years after I left.
My experience was the polar opposite, if the poles were bent around like a horseshoe magnet. Rather than suffocating under thick expectations, I was gasping for air without direction.
My first advisor recognized that his lab's interests had shifted between my application and my arrival, so he gave me free reign to figure out where my interests lay for my first year. (The nexus of programming languages, concurrency, and logic, if you're wondering.) He moved on to another university, and as an introvert who'd barely been out of state without my family, much less on my own in another country, I chose not to go with him.
I met my second advisor in a seminar course on static analysis and formal methods -- his first on joining the university. It was completely up my alley, and we got along really well. Given the situation with my first advisor, we were on the same wavelength about becoming his first official student. But he thought he was getting a grad student who had done real research for a year, and in reality I still had no idea how to approach research. He had to lower his expectations a few times, and since he started from an expectation that I wouldn't need much guidance, I never really got the amount of attention I asked for. We ended up parting ways with bad feelings.
I can't really blame my advisors personally. I still don't know enough about the day-to-day of the academic system to judge. And I'm sure there are places where (and advisors of whom) you can expect more support.
But my takeaway, from my experience and from this article, is that if you go in without knowing what you're getting into, nobody's going to be there to tell you what to do. You either luck into finding a sustainable approach, or you don't.
I still want to go back to grad school. I think my experience will help me know better what my needs are and where those can be provided, and thus make me a less risky proposition for a university to take on. But I regret not taking a gap year to really dig in and understand the system I was going to put myself through.
(EDIT: My advisors are good people, and I wish them well. I hope that's clear from what I've written. Things just didn't work out.)
The author was sort of like me. When I entered my Ph.D., I had a dream of finding something really big. But I was disappointed to find that those low hanging fruits of big questions had been answered. Those left were impossible to answer with current technology. People were just guessing the answers by some hints, rather than evidences. I decided to leave to do a very ordinary job after getting my Ph.D.. I do not regret it. What I have learned is if you really like a subject, you should be fine with solving those trivial problems, while enjoy the fact that the real questions are there to be answered, but you may not see them answered in your lifetime. Otherwise, don't do a Ph.D. in theory directions.
Drawing yet a bittersweet story. There's one word written all over this experience - "burn-out".
Science, just as any other domain of this human life does need these youthful, dreaming, some may call "naive", yet daring believers.
This energy is precious, just as it is also short-lived and fragile. If it sparks at a right moment and could burn for the needed time, it may bring into view those hard to find solutions to well known hard to crack problems.
However, should it glow at not so right time and for too long, that youthful source just burns out.
The best a wise advisor/mentor could do is to instill some burning discipline. Or the very least to recognize when the burning may become unsustainable. And intervene, channel it, help to recharge, lead.
Perhaps, developing this sort of discipline should be parents' job. Still, a lot of talented and strong minds simply overheat and shut off in one way or another just for self-preservation.
No blame for quitting. I just wonder if there a way to design these young minds for stronger more efficient TDP, so to speak?
The section on being ill-prepared and out of his depth compared to fellow (mostly international) grad students with stronger math backgrounds stretching back to elementary school was almost identical to my experience in a top 5 operations research PhD program. A typical American AP Calc HS curriculum and a CS undergrad (even one with theory/ML heavy upperclass work) just don't cover the math that's relevant for top level research work in most applied math domains (theoretical CS included). I and every other US student in my cohort (roughly a quarter of the class) wound up dropping out - none of the international students did. It was undoubtedly for the best, but there is still a twinge of sadness to have closed the door on my dreams of pushing the frontiers of knowledge (foolhardy and grandiose as they may have been).
I feel like during graduate school I was somewhat like the author, but this line really is the answer to this:
> Rajeev, I believe, just liked doing the math. The thing was a puzzle he could solve, so he solved it. For him that was enough.
I started my grad school career also wanting to go into particle theory, I ended up doing plasma physics honestly because it was the opportunity I could find. I didn't really dislike math or theory or anything. I also sort of wanted to chase the grail or whatever, although I moved on after being disillusioned by HEP in general because of some of the things the author mentioned. That said, I think it wasn't until my the first year out of grad school in first post-doc (probably current, even though the grant names have changed it's the same group even though it's been a few years) that I realized no, I love doing, that is, the actual doing. I love getting on a computer, running simulations, writing code, analyzing data, closing my eyes and imagining electrons in a plasma. I mean I care about the "grail" which I'd assume would be fusion ultimately, and understanding some of the plasma physics more immediately, but the reason I'm in it isn't really the problem, I love the work itself.
I think it's valuable to be chase after lofty goals and such but really doing science, with all its warts (which are legion), you have to enjoy actually doing the work, whether it's in the lab, doing calculations, or running simulations like myself. Money and stability is another issue, but if I could get paid to do this with no hicups, I would literally stay here my entire life.
"... stay the stressful course of wandering in the dark and guessing ..."
I feel like that's a highly accurate description of my career path (I'm a dev, not in physics). The part about dreading going back into work and the feelings of being inadequate - that the best effort is only treading water - is basically how I feel too. I wonder how common that is.
Ultimately this guy should have had the mind to shop around more for other professors who motivate their work better. Maybe do some experiments? You're not stuck with one advisor, and it isn't unreasonable to think that it's your job and not a convenience, or someone else's job, to find good motivation for your work.
He didn't want to do experiments. He wanted to chase the holy grail in theory. He was full of himself. He didn't want to be Hamilton. He wanted to be Newton. Hamilton was brilliant and amazing and changed the world. I would happily settle for being Hamilton.
> So I did strike out on my own. A subject called random matrix theory was hot in physics at the time, applied to condensed matter phenomena and to the quantum behavior of classically chaotic systems. The relevant math was familiar to me from engineering. I figured I’d just dive in, learn the subject, and come out the other end with a publishable discovery.
Did he find something interesting on random matrices? Years ago I was researching random cycles and found a phenomenon of emergent order, that seems related to the universality of random matrices. But I'm just a programmer playing around with numbers.
I was also lost for a while working on my physics Ph.D. The course work ended with the state of physics in 1930 (this was the late 80's). I was also trying to do Lattice Gauge theory which involves many different areas: statistical mechanics, high energy, ... I really struggled trying to get up to speed on these.
My wife was finishing her finance doctorate so I had a deadline. I had already worked on some statistical mechanics projects and had the idea of downsizing and just expand on them. After this decision, I was done in a year (and before my wife was finished).
As the essay shows, it is very easy to get lost working on a physics Ph.D. After getting my degree, I ending up teaching CS for ten years before getting into software development. While it was stressful at times, I don't regret my physics education. I learned a lot (sometimes by being thrown into the deep end).
This article made me subscribe to the magazine hoping to find more amazing articles, but I don’t think there was ever an article that had this kind of emotional impact as this one in nautilus.
Still this single article was worth the subscription.
I have to say that if you have difficulty with the definitions and basic intuition of fiber bundles, you probably don't have a great future in high-energy theoretical physics. Fiber bundles are the foundation of modern approaches to gauge theory, which is ubiquitous in high-energy theory. Any junior or senior math major should be able to grok them with little or no difficulty (speaking from experience: I learned them from a physics book as a junior). I can appreciate that an engineering grad might not have much experience with comparably abstract math, though.
Life is too short for these shenanigans. But, I think that you should still go for it if and only if you understand what you’re getting yourself into. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
I think this is the most important comment. Most people don't realize until much later, that everything is a trade. This for that. You get an advanced degree at the cost of: higher income? free time? finding the right partner? That's what life is about. Everything has a price, and not knowing the cost is the biggest mistake.
This article resonates quite strongly with me. I also did a PhD in physics which I grew more and more disillusioned with as it progressed.
I did physics in undergrad, then worked for a few years as an engineer. I was the only one on my team who didn’t have a PhD, and saw the limits of my own knowledge, so I went back to school to get my
PhD in experimental condensed matter physics.
Originally I thought I’d struggle through the classes, then do some kickass research, and come back to being a full-time engineer.
Turned out to be quite the opposite. My first semester transitioning back to being a full-time student was rough, but after that I really enjoyed the classes, and for the next couple years I wanted to do tenure track research in academia.
I then signed on with a faculty member athe department hired as my advisor, to study nanoscale physics (eg superconducting nanowires). Fast forward a few more years and I started to hate the daily grind.
Firstly, my advisor was hired in my third year, so we had to build up the lab from scratch. Every little bit of cryogenic equipment, data measuring apparatus, data acquisition and analysis code. Took a couple years before we could do “real” research of interest.
Also we had no senior grad students or post docs to learn from. I felt way behind all my colleagues who were in functioning labs and could start taking publication-quality data after just a few weeks of joining their group.
Most of my day-to-day wasn’t even physics but annoying laboratory maintenance. Eg finding cold leaks in the cryogenic equipment (these only leak at temperatures of 4K or less, so it took lot of trial and error to find). Or tracking down ground loops on my circuits that were blowing up my fragile nanowires. Or fighting the sputtering chambers we used for deposition (and realising they had been contaminated with magnetic materials making it impossible to grow clean superconducting films).
I saw my friends at other schools write paper after paper in top journals working in their well-established labs with huge-budget clean rooms and facilities with full-time maintenance and support staff. Meanwhile in my lab we had limited equipment, no maintenance staff, and we had to fix stuff in our ‘spare’ time, etc.
I became jealous of my theorist friends who could work anywhere with just their notebooks and a pencil.
I became jealous of my astrophysics friends who were assigned observing time on Hubble and other telescopes, where teams of technicians would make sure their observations would go smoothly and provide them with perfect raw data.
I saw that without any seminal publications, my postdoc opportunities were slim. I thought about changing research areas, but came to the realisation that I’m stuck doing the same narrow brand of research that I had been doing the past few years. Because no faculty member would pay for a postdoc who wasn’t ready to hit the ground running as a domain expert.
I saw some of my successful friends with lots of amazing papers struggle to find a postdoc appointment. Or if they found one struggle to find a second, or a good faculty position. And if it was a struggle for them, my lack of publications would make this nearly impossible for myself.
I was working 12+ hour days making barely enough to live on. And not enjoying it at all, and feeling depressed, with difficulty getting out of bed to come into the lab.
Then one day pretty much on a whim I applied for an internship as a quant on Wall Street. I was invited to an interview where I was grilled over two days in 11 separate one-on-one sessions. In between sessions I would look out the window of the 30 floor of a skyscraper in NYC and wonder if I was betraying myself and my fellow physicists, as if academia was a cult.
I was offered an internship, and really liked it. This was my ticket out.
I went back to school at the end of the summer to write up my thesis.
Many of my physics friends were curious about my internship and were considering doing this themselves. All of them told me not to tell anyone else that we had spoken.
I wrote a few drafts for papers, one was published, defended my thesis and got myself outta there.
It would be interesting to do some kind of writing style analysis on posted articles and the comments about them. I wonder if you could show that the style rubs off on the comments.
Like with this:
> I was invited to an interview where I was grilled over two days in 11 separate one-on-one sessions. In between sessions I would look out the window of the 30 floor of a skyscraper in NYC and wonder if I was betraying myself and my fellow physicists, as if academia was a cult.
You could have pulled that straight from the OP. The tone, the cadence, and the way it interrupts a high-level summary to insert a pretty image.
[+] [-] cammikebrown|5 years ago|reply
I figured a physics degree would allow me to get a good job, but then they said, sure, if you want to do finance, defense, or education. What?! The first two were pretty nauseating so I decided to do a year-long internship at various local public schools, and realized that I hated that too. (More the bureaucracy than the actual teaching aspect.) My school basically expected you’d double major in math or CS, so they often didn’t teach a lot of the fundamental techniques you needed, assuming you knew it already. I also learned that while my high school had done a great job teaching me English and history, the math department was not quite up to snuff comparatively, and I felt behind my classmates about “fundamentals” like linear algebra, which they had somehow been taught in high school. Sure, I knew Shakespeare a lot better than them, and even minored in literature in college (maybe biting off more than I could chew) but that clearly didn’t impress them. Why waste your time with old books when you could be making money! It definitely brought me down a notch and made me feel dumb, but I also realized college wasn’t a place for someone to learn lots of different things, but to focus on one area instead. I ended up becoming a bartender and I’m very happy with that decision. At least, once things are back to normal, hopefully within the next few months. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it
[+] [-] hellbannedguy|5 years ago|reply
If I had a kid, I would supplement his education. I would make sure he knew mathematics well. I also think physics should be taught much earlier, along with the finance, and the markets. As a kid, I was interested in woodworking, cars, engines, even electricity, but the teachers had us coloring world maps?
[+] [-] analog31|5 years ago|reply
Indeed, it was some decades ago, but at my college, there was substantial overlap between the requirements for the math and physics majors, to the point where just a few additional credits got you both. And it was a time when CS was still being taught in math departments at some colleges, so there were courses that you could take for either CS or math credit.
I actually came from the other direction, started as a math major and added physics, which I then studied in grad school.
In my view the affinity between physics and programming (and electronics) is no accident. Physics was computational before the computer age. We ran out of problems that could be solved in "closed" form, early in the 20th century. The Manhattan Project employed a staff of "computers" who performed calculations on mechanical calculators and punch card machines. Scientific programming predates the software industry. Today, virtually every scientific instrument is computerized, every experiment is automated. My PhD thesis experiment ran on thousands of lines of code.
Every physics student learned to program. What they didn't do is pay attention to turning us necessarily into good programmers. Since I didn't take any CS courses, I had to pick that stuff up on my own, and have continued working on improving my programming technique to this day.
[+] [-] dataflow|5 years ago|reply
Coding knowledge is becoming a matter of literacy for more and more professions, so it might be worth trying to pick up a bit of it before it's too late - lockdown might be an especially good time.
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedf1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|5 years ago|reply
People knock the recent Alien films but you know the scene where the android is leading the team through a theater of charred bodies and you think "holy shit, this is a HINT, how do you not see it?"
Well, when I got home, I realized that the disgruntled postdocs around me -- some of whom were smarter and worked harder than me and still got thrown out like so much trash because their thesis didn't pan out -- were also a HINT. How did I not see it before?
Thanks, Prometheus. You weren't a great movie, but you had a very important impact on my life.
[+] [-] analog31|5 years ago|reply
We pursue the degree for deep personal reasons that are hard to discourage, even in the face of harsh economic reality.
I did a back of envelope calculation based on the number of grad students, the number of post-docs, their duration, etc., and concluded that I would need to be a superstar to ever get tenure. And I was not a superstar. On the other hand I've had a good career in industry, with no regrets. I live in a nice town, and rarely have to work long hours.
I was extremely lucky that both of my parents are industrial scientists, so I knew there was an honorable alternative to being a professor. The only hitch is that my own professors in physics could encourage my change of plan, but had no idea how to help me pursue it. I guessed correctly that computer programming would be important. ;-)
While I was not a research superstar, I was very good at making complicated machines work for other people. That's what I do today.
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
I feel like our society and schooling really pushes the idyllic visions of things as well as the idea of strict meritocracy. I feel like this has left many of us jaded when we realize much of what we were told as we grew up were only half-truths concealing a bleak reality from us, and in some cases dooming us to self-inflicted issues like the one's described in the article.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
I so wish I could do beautiful coding work but societies are not aligned with beauty (even at zero cost) so i'm bailing toward financial independance and peace of mind. Hopefully you and I can make time to join club or do thinking on our own terms.
[+] [-] xyzzy123|5 years ago|reply
If I look around me, I can identify only a very few who are paid a living wage to do a) a thing that they enjoy that b) doesn't have a direct, immediate benefit to others.
It's not just physicists, it's theorists of all kinds, the arts, history, and yes, underwater basket weaving too.
[+] [-] KingFelix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahelwer|5 years ago|reply
I've spent the past decade or so living frugally & working in big tech. I now have enough saved up that I can conceivably work on a couple contracts a year then spend the rest of the time working on whatever I want. I think I know enough to do useful, interesting things in computer science without going to grad school. So that's one path I can take. The other would be to go to grad school for physics, but able to maintain greater material comfort than the author of this piece - and having already made peace with the end of a burning desire to shake the world. I wonder whether those two things would make a difference to my experience.
[+] [-] 2sk21|5 years ago|reply
I retired early from software development last year to spend more time studying math and cognitive science.
[+] [-] wrycoder|5 years ago|reply
It is not at all necessary to go to graduate school to immerse yourself in physics. A Deepdyve subscription will expose most of the literature.
Do as they do in England, "read" physics. It is a never ending joy for me.
Having to do physics to earn a living from it diminishes the joy, because you have to do what others want you to do and not follow your own course.
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
Not all grad school is like this. It varies greatly by subjects and also by degree level. For example, a Master's degree can be easily attainable through night school while working. Education PhDs have their own challenges, but it usually doesn't resemble the types of questions and struggles the author describes about physics.
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
What I saw was some very intelligent people whose hard work, creativity, and genius I admired making very little money, scavenging for grants like jackals, their spouses working second jobs, their clothing a little worn, their cars breaking down even as they labored over Big Issues. That is the payoff?
I did not pursue it any further. Yes, the degree itself impresses people (sometimes more than really necessary, is my feeling), and it certainly primes you to be able to switch gears for entirely different frameworks, but it has opened doors.
Meanwhile, I occasionally look at the odd paper, sniff around. For strings (oh, not strings, superstrings) (oh, not superstrings, M-theory) it's all out of my league, but not so much so I cannot feel the shape of things and just how far they are from being more than just very abstract mathematical constructs. "Fiber bundles," exactly how many strings and shiny hag-stones are we out on that particular Glass Bead Game?
I accept the possibility that the universe may simply be too difficult, on a mathematical level, for mere humans to understand. It could happen. On the other hand, I suspect that the development of mathematical models of physical phenomena without frequent touching of the "real world," fumbling for guideposts, why, you could very well wander off into a paper map of your own creation, unrelated to the world you wanted to explain.
[+] [-] trhway|5 years ago|reply
to me the current situation looks similar to when we were building more and more complex combinations of epicycles in order to more and more precisely model the "Sun and the planets rotating around the Earth". Similarly we have right now a couple of dogmas, like say Copenhagen interpretation and the recently emerged dark matter, which while not confirmed by experiments yet can't be questioned (classic sign of dogma) and as a result the science resources are available only for the complex epicycle constructs based on those dogmas.
[+] [-] daxfohl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mef51|5 years ago|reply
> "But in the end, I never knew what I was looking for and I didn’t find it."
To me it felt like you were looking for meaning and purpose in quantum gravity and its (mis-)characterization as the Grail, or at least in the process of working on quantum gravity. But it seemed like it was difficult to admit to yourself that it wasn't working, which ultimately makes the going even tougher.
I'm in a physics phd right now and I see this disconnect in myself and in other academics a lot.
[+] [-] daxfohl|5 years ago|reply
In other words, I think even if the author had "succeeded" to the point of being top in his class and exceeding the research output of his advisor, he'd still be unhappy, still consider himself unsuccessful. Opting out was probably the best decision he could have made, and his life is probably more productive thereby. And heck, maybe he even still has a better chance of finding some theory of everything via some analogy he comes across in his day to day work than by a life of research in "fiber bundles".
[+] [-] Twisol|5 years ago|reply
My experience was the polar opposite, if the poles were bent around like a horseshoe magnet. Rather than suffocating under thick expectations, I was gasping for air without direction.
My first advisor recognized that his lab's interests had shifted between my application and my arrival, so he gave me free reign to figure out where my interests lay for my first year. (The nexus of programming languages, concurrency, and logic, if you're wondering.) He moved on to another university, and as an introvert who'd barely been out of state without my family, much less on my own in another country, I chose not to go with him.
I met my second advisor in a seminar course on static analysis and formal methods -- his first on joining the university. It was completely up my alley, and we got along really well. Given the situation with my first advisor, we were on the same wavelength about becoming his first official student. But he thought he was getting a grad student who had done real research for a year, and in reality I still had no idea how to approach research. He had to lower his expectations a few times, and since he started from an expectation that I wouldn't need much guidance, I never really got the amount of attention I asked for. We ended up parting ways with bad feelings.
I can't really blame my advisors personally. I still don't know enough about the day-to-day of the academic system to judge. And I'm sure there are places where (and advisors of whom) you can expect more support.
But my takeaway, from my experience and from this article, is that if you go in without knowing what you're getting into, nobody's going to be there to tell you what to do. You either luck into finding a sustainable approach, or you don't.
I still want to go back to grad school. I think my experience will help me know better what my needs are and where those can be provided, and thus make me a less risky proposition for a university to take on. But I regret not taking a gap year to really dig in and understand the system I was going to put myself through.
(EDIT: My advisors are good people, and I wish them well. I hope that's clear from what I've written. Things just didn't work out.)
[+] [-] superfamicom|5 years ago|reply
2019 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19010164
2016 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276968
[+] [-] youdonotknowme|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoomablemind|5 years ago|reply
Science, just as any other domain of this human life does need these youthful, dreaming, some may call "naive", yet daring believers.
This energy is precious, just as it is also short-lived and fragile. If it sparks at a right moment and could burn for the needed time, it may bring into view those hard to find solutions to well known hard to crack problems.
However, should it glow at not so right time and for too long, that youthful source just burns out.
The best a wise advisor/mentor could do is to instill some burning discipline. Or the very least to recognize when the burning may become unsustainable. And intervene, channel it, help to recharge, lead.
Perhaps, developing this sort of discipline should be parents' job. Still, a lot of talented and strong minds simply overheat and shut off in one way or another just for self-preservation.
No blame for quitting. I just wonder if there a way to design these young minds for stronger more efficient TDP, so to speak?
[+] [-] yxwvut|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|5 years ago|reply
> Rajeev, I believe, just liked doing the math. The thing was a puzzle he could solve, so he solved it. For him that was enough.
I started my grad school career also wanting to go into particle theory, I ended up doing plasma physics honestly because it was the opportunity I could find. I didn't really dislike math or theory or anything. I also sort of wanted to chase the grail or whatever, although I moved on after being disillusioned by HEP in general because of some of the things the author mentioned. That said, I think it wasn't until my the first year out of grad school in first post-doc (probably current, even though the grant names have changed it's the same group even though it's been a few years) that I realized no, I love doing, that is, the actual doing. I love getting on a computer, running simulations, writing code, analyzing data, closing my eyes and imagining electrons in a plasma. I mean I care about the "grail" which I'd assume would be fusion ultimately, and understanding some of the plasma physics more immediately, but the reason I'm in it isn't really the problem, I love the work itself.
I think it's valuable to be chase after lofty goals and such but really doing science, with all its warts (which are legion), you have to enjoy actually doing the work, whether it's in the lab, doing calculations, or running simulations like myself. Money and stability is another issue, but if I could get paid to do this with no hicups, I would literally stay here my entire life.
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
I feel like that's a highly accurate description of my career path (I'm a dev, not in physics). The part about dreading going back into work and the feelings of being inadequate - that the best effort is only treading water - is basically how I feel too. I wonder how common that is.
[+] [-] rendall|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjfl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creativeandlazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|5 years ago|reply
Well, he was/is a theoretical physicist.
[+] [-] ffhhj|5 years ago|reply
Did he find something interesting on random matrices? Years ago I was researching random cycles and found a phenomenon of emergent order, that seems related to the universality of random matrices. But I'm just a programmer playing around with numbers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130610074258/https://www.simon...
[+] [-] pacman128|5 years ago|reply
My wife was finishing her finance doctorate so I had a deadline. I had already worked on some statistical mechanics projects and had the idea of downsizing and just expand on them. After this decision, I was done in a year (and before my wife was finished).
As the essay shows, it is very easy to get lost working on a physics Ph.D. After getting my degree, I ending up teaching CS for ten years before getting into software development. While it was stressful at times, I don't regret my physics education. I learned a lot (sometimes by being thrown into the deep end).
[+] [-] j7ake|5 years ago|reply
Still this single article was worth the subscription.
[+] [-] dandep|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senderista|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bezout|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemiller2002|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffwass|5 years ago|reply
I did physics in undergrad, then worked for a few years as an engineer. I was the only one on my team who didn’t have a PhD, and saw the limits of my own knowledge, so I went back to school to get my PhD in experimental condensed matter physics.
Originally I thought I’d struggle through the classes, then do some kickass research, and come back to being a full-time engineer.
Turned out to be quite the opposite. My first semester transitioning back to being a full-time student was rough, but after that I really enjoyed the classes, and for the next couple years I wanted to do tenure track research in academia.
I then signed on with a faculty member athe department hired as my advisor, to study nanoscale physics (eg superconducting nanowires). Fast forward a few more years and I started to hate the daily grind.
Firstly, my advisor was hired in my third year, so we had to build up the lab from scratch. Every little bit of cryogenic equipment, data measuring apparatus, data acquisition and analysis code. Took a couple years before we could do “real” research of interest.
Also we had no senior grad students or post docs to learn from. I felt way behind all my colleagues who were in functioning labs and could start taking publication-quality data after just a few weeks of joining their group.
Most of my day-to-day wasn’t even physics but annoying laboratory maintenance. Eg finding cold leaks in the cryogenic equipment (these only leak at temperatures of 4K or less, so it took lot of trial and error to find). Or tracking down ground loops on my circuits that were blowing up my fragile nanowires. Or fighting the sputtering chambers we used for deposition (and realising they had been contaminated with magnetic materials making it impossible to grow clean superconducting films).
I saw my friends at other schools write paper after paper in top journals working in their well-established labs with huge-budget clean rooms and facilities with full-time maintenance and support staff. Meanwhile in my lab we had limited equipment, no maintenance staff, and we had to fix stuff in our ‘spare’ time, etc.
I became jealous of my theorist friends who could work anywhere with just their notebooks and a pencil.
I became jealous of my astrophysics friends who were assigned observing time on Hubble and other telescopes, where teams of technicians would make sure their observations would go smoothly and provide them with perfect raw data.
I saw that without any seminal publications, my postdoc opportunities were slim. I thought about changing research areas, but came to the realisation that I’m stuck doing the same narrow brand of research that I had been doing the past few years. Because no faculty member would pay for a postdoc who wasn’t ready to hit the ground running as a domain expert.
I saw some of my successful friends with lots of amazing papers struggle to find a postdoc appointment. Or if they found one struggle to find a second, or a good faculty position. And if it was a struggle for them, my lack of publications would make this nearly impossible for myself.
I was working 12+ hour days making barely enough to live on. And not enjoying it at all, and feeling depressed, with difficulty getting out of bed to come into the lab.
Then one day pretty much on a whim I applied for an internship as a quant on Wall Street. I was invited to an interview where I was grilled over two days in 11 separate one-on-one sessions. In between sessions I would look out the window of the 30 floor of a skyscraper in NYC and wonder if I was betraying myself and my fellow physicists, as if academia was a cult.
I was offered an internship, and really liked it. This was my ticket out.
I went back to school at the end of the summer to write up my thesis.
Many of my physics friends were curious about my internship and were considering doing this themselves. All of them told me not to tell anyone else that we had spoken.
I wrote a few drafts for papers, one was published, defended my thesis and got myself outta there.
[+] [-] niknoble|5 years ago|reply
Like with this:
> I was invited to an interview where I was grilled over two days in 11 separate one-on-one sessions. In between sessions I would look out the window of the 30 floor of a skyscraper in NYC and wonder if I was betraying myself and my fellow physicists, as if academia was a cult.
You could have pulled that straight from the OP. The tone, the cadence, and the way it interrupts a high-level summary to insert a pretty image.