Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 333 posts

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#131

Post by Rerarom »

hpcjoe wrote: post #91
vijayshankarv wrote: post #58

Condensed matter physics PhD (2016) now working in the software industry as a data scientist. Focused on modelling/simulating materials during my thesis and realized that I loved the software aspect of things and did not love working on the same problem for many months at a time. As others mentioned, transitioning to data science is not that hard if you have a physics background and there are many interesting problem…

The two body problem (2 professionals in academia finding jobs close to each other, for some value of close that is reasonable for daily life) is famous in science in general. It is, unless one of you has a Nobel Prize, unsolvable without one person making a change of career.

Or if you live in a country that grants permanent positions early and easily.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#132

Post by SiempreViernes »

bluedevilzn wrote: post #74
sprash wrote: post #49

Nuclear physicist now developing options strategies and corresponding specialized financial software for a hedge fund. I'd rather go back and work at the particle accelerator but there is zero chance for a permanent position as a researcher for a regular dude like me.

I bet hedge fund pays significantly more too, no?

Unless they accept you working less hours there's not that much joy to be derived from more money for boring tasks.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#133

Post by xingped »

eightorbit wrote: post #62

Just so you don't get the impression every physicist is having a fabulous time, here's me: I have a bachelors in physics. I went for a phd in biology but had to bail to work to support family, plus I can't seem to come up with original ideas. I now have a job with physicist as part of the title, but what I really do is try to read bad handwriting from records from nuclear weapons plants. It's a dull job a monkey coul…

To be entirely fair, people not educated in physics would likely have a very hard time at your job because we don't know the terminology or what makes sense for your field. If I tried to do what you do, I'd likely have no clue what half of the pigeon-scratch is because I flat out do not even know what the words or concepts are.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#134

Post by micheles »

I left academia in 2003, after 3 postdocs in Theoretical Physics (Quantum Field Theory, Thermal Field Theory, some Cosmology). The reason was certainly not the money, rather job security, it is kind of stressful to change continent every two years and not being sure of where you will be next year. All that with the very probable outcome of being left without a position. Also, I found I girl that later on I married.

So I started studying Python and since them I got various jobs as a developer, including 7 years working in Finance, where I did a lot of Postgres and also some web programming. In the last 6 years I have been doing numerical simulations for Earthquakes, helping the geologist on the IT side of things (like parallelization and performance). The funny thing is that all work in Physics I did had nothing to do with computers, except for writing papers in Latex. I was doing analytical calculations with paper and pencil, since Mathematical was not good enough (found a lot of bugs in it when computing integrals).

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#135

Post by avar »

digitalsushi wrote: post #125
superhuzza wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very, very hesitant to to this. First of all, you definitely don't want any chance of incorrect recognition of handwriting coming from a nuclear weapons plant . Secondly, who knows what policies he might violate by using some unauthorized, untested software (whether OP is the author or not) with potentially sensitive information.

one could make a similar argument that no one should have tried making a car that could drive better than a human

This is more like some guy in the early 1900s having the job of hand-delivering important information on a horse.

Then deciding on his own on the advice of HN that he should try a car for that task instead, the car breaking down, and the guy getting fired because his employer never approved of this whole "car" thing and he shouldn't have introduced that into his job workflow without having talked to his employer about it.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#137

Post by rubidium »

Physics PhD, 2015. I knew from the start of my PhD that I didn't want to pursue academia. The PhD was like being in a band for 6 years and doing really cool stuff.

Went right into industry after PhD working for a life sciences company in systems engineering (the product design type, not the computer networking type). Now managing a small team designing robotic systems to automate chemistry/biology research.

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#138

Post by SiempreViernes »

mef51 wrote: post #116

PHD student... working on measuring the magnetic field in clouds that are really really far away! Astronomically far away! This is to understand and observe star formation. I don't see myself staying in academia though I love research.

Yo! Zeeman splitting or faraday rotation?

Re: Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

#140

Post by btrettel »

physics137 wrote: post #43

I'll leave this here, since many comments are about the transition from physics to data science. "For now, however, in hard-core physical science at least, there is little evidence of any major BD-driven breakthroughs, at least not in fields where insight and understanding rather than zerosales resistance is the prime target: physics and chemistry do not succumb readily to the seduction of BD/ML/AI. It is extremely r…

Nice quote. I'll have to read that paper later.

You can merge ML and theory in at least one way. I attended a talk by Prof. Karen Willcox of the University of Texas at Austin (I'm a PhD student in mechanical engineering there) where she argued that in fluid dynamics and combustion at least, it's better to use "model order reduction" instead of machine learning. The problem with many models (e.g., Navier-Stokes equations) in these fields is that they are computationally expensive. Model order reduction looks for ways to reduce the computational cost of the model while maintaining accuracy, and it uses many of the same techniques as machine learning. Based on the examples she gave it seemed to be the closest thing I've seen to merge the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_order_reduction

http://kiwi.ices.utexas.edu/

Post reply on HN