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

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

#151

Post by PopeDotNinja »

djaque wrote: post #144

(Current PhD Student) Although the case for building new and more powerful hadron accelerators doesn't look good, accelerator physics is flourishing with other types of machines. Particularly interesting to me is ultrafast electron diffraction (UED)[1,2]. UED is cool because you can create atomic resolution movies with speeds that can (in the near future) resolve chemical reactions as they occur. (eg. imagine being a…

> Although the case for building new and more powerful hadron accelerators doesn't look good, accelerator physics is flourishing with other types of machines.

Relevant "I saw this on YouTube" video:

- "Should we build a bigger particle collider? - Sixty Symbols"

- https://youtu.be/-cD66O01E4E

- TL;DR: the LHC has only found one new particle, and it was looking for it. Before spending 30 years and 10-20 billion pounds on a 4x bigger collider, maybe we should wait until we have an idea of what we'd be looking for, as it's not clear what the larger collider would be looking for. The downside of not building a new collider soon is that the people who know how to build a collider now won't sit around waiting until we decide to build one, so starting from scratch in the future will presumably take longer & be more expensive.

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

#152

Post by soapboxrocket »

I have a BS in physics but have never been in the "physics" field. I was tired of school and left to make some money. I ended up in aerospace designing test equipment installs for flight test aircraft to support certification. I have spent most of my career in oxygen systems for aircraft and am now in the process of starting a new aerospace company.

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

#153

Post by djaque »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #151
djaque wrote: post #144

(Current PhD Student) Although the case for building new and more powerful hadron accelerators doesn't look good, accelerator physics is flourishing with other types of machines. Particularly interesting to me is ultrafast electron diffraction (UED)[1,2]. UED is cool because you can create atomic resolution movies with speeds that can (in the near future) resolve chemical reactions as they occur. (eg. imagine being a…

> Although the case for building new and more powerful hadron accelerators doesn't look good, accelerator physics is flourishing with other types of machines. Relevant "I saw this on YouTube" video: - "Should we build a bigger particle collider? - Sixty Symbols" - https://youtu.be/-cD66O01E4E - TL;DR: the LHC has only found one new particle, and it was looking for it. Before spending 30 years and 10-20 billion pounds…

Yeah, and another recent piece of news is that the design committee for the international linear collider (ILC) which was to be built in Japan concluded that there wasn't a physics justification for it. Although a final decision needs to be made from the Japanese government, it looks like the ILC is dead leaving the future circular collider (FCC) as the only large new design. (Edit: it looks like Japan has decided not to build the ILC [1])

However, I think there is a lot of interesting physics for accelerators beyond colliders. For instance, the linac coherent light source (LCLS) is a huge x-ray laser out in California [2]. They are in the middle of a big upgrade and employ a large number of accelerator physicists. There is also still a huge amount we need to learn about how free electron lasers work and how we can improve them.

Another big topic of research is energy recovery linacs (ERLs). We are just on the cusp of being able to implement a technology that could save something like 90% of the wall plug power of current accelerators. They draw a huge amount of power, so the benefit of this saving is pretty clear. The first machine to demonstrate this new technology will come online this summer (hopefully). [3]

[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/disappointment-as-japan-fails-to-...

[2] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu/

[3] https://www.classe.cornell.edu/Research/ERL/CBETA.html

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

#155

Post by eightorbit »

xingped wrote: post #133
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.

That's a fair point.

Still, I feel I could take any of my students and in one month have them up to speed on what to look for and what things mean.

And I don't mean to suggest that finding challenging work is any sort of failing of my employer. I have been able to diversify the position to include doing graphics in R and some stats things and, along with some other people, I think we can sell some sexy Bayesian things.

They are very receptive of new ideas, but... it is not a growing industry (thankfully), so any sort of advance is going to be a jump to a different field. Which is possible, and I'm working on it.

My point primarily is when you read these things about people doing all sorts of wonderful exciting things, you get the impression that what you have done or are doing is crap. Perhaps it's nice to hear that a lot of people do not set the world on fire. Takes a little pressure off.

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

#156

Post by vijayshankarv »

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.

I know a few people who have stayed in academia and done this.

In my case, my partner is not in academia which makes it a bit easier.

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

#158

Post by karasinski »

I have a bachelors in Physics. When I finished my bachelors I took a long look at my odds of getting a job in physics, then moved to Silicon Valley and marketed myself as a software developer. I'm now about a year out from finishing my PhD in Aerospace Engineering, and I've been working at NASA for the past three years.

It's nice to read all the other survivor stories in this thread of those of us that spent years studying to be physicists only to be crushed by reality. Physics is tough, and I'm happy to read that many folks here have found success in the field.

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

#160

Post by fabiomaia »

Retric wrote: post #111
fabiomaia wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can use it such that the model's predictions are still manually verified by him before actually submitting them or whatever. Seems pretty harmless to me.

Manual verification is likely just as tedious as doing it by hand in the first place.

Probably. But maybe he'll get a kick out of modeling and automating it. Challenging his intellect seems to be the key point here.
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