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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?

#271

Post by taneq »

kriro wrote: post #68
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…

"""try to read bad handwriting from records from nuclear weapons plants. It's a dull job a monkey could do but it pays the bills.""" + """For years I worked as a computer guy for an academic department and that was fun and I'm trying to get back into it""" Sounds like you could enjoy automating your work. Learn a bit of Python and some Machine Learning/Deep Learning and digitize the handwriting and build a little pro…

Regretfully pragmatic viewpoint here: The poster is currently relying on this menial job for income. Automating it before he has something else lined up could be a really bad idea, financially.

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

#273

Post by jordansmithnz »

I have a bachelors degree in physics, but ended up developing iOS apps.

Physics turned out a little more dull than I expected (I wanted something with more creativity), and an app I’d started working on as a hobby turned into a full time income, so I started pursuing this instead (https://classtimetable.app).

I took a few full time iOS jobs, continued to improve my engineering skills, and I’m currently working for a top five tech company on a popular iOS app.

Physics certainly taught me a few skills that I use on a daily basis - math and problem solving are good examples. I didn’t move to software specifically for the money, but comparatively physics seemed a little more dull, and software seemed to have new and exciting opportunities (like the app that I started building as a hobby).

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

#274

Post by MLWithPhil »

I got my PhD in physics back in 2012, after doing my dissertation in spin dependent transport phenomena in magnetic materials.

got a job at Intel as a back end process engineer, which was pretty cool, but I was then laid off in 2015.

These days I'm all about machine learning. Teaching myself by creating content, and hopefully educating others. It's been really cool seeing the overlap in some concepts (systems seeking minimum energy vs. gradient descent) between ML and physics, and I'm hoping my background will pay dividends as I get deeper into the field.

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

#275

Post by MLWithPhil »

da-bacon wrote: post #261

I currently work on the software that runs Google's quantum computers. To paraphrase the Talking Heads: How did I get there? PhD 2001 in physics, working on quantum computation. Postdocs at Caltech and Santa Fe Institute, then landed a research faculty position at the University of Washington. Yeah, raise your own funds! Jumped ship in 2011 (burnout, quality of life, university not caring about quantum computing) and…

Very cool stuff. To what extent would you recommend people study the underlying physics of QM, vs. the more domain specific content of quantum computing?

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

#276

Post by mef51 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #138
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?

Fancier! Goldreich-Kylafis of molecular lines (which you can do with weakly zeeman splitting molecules) and anisotropic resonant scattering (houde et al. 2013, 2014 etc.)

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

#277

Post by [deleted] »

stared wrote: post #46

Deep learning consulting ("I teach people to teach machines"). Finished my PhD in quantum optics in 2014, but immediately moved to data science. Why not physics? Full version: http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html tl:dr: I wanted a fast-pasted field with more freedom. Physics is now stale (no fundamental changes in the last decades, compared to each year in deep learning; cf. physics in 1900-1920), and a…

[deleted]

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

#278

Post by ChrisFoster »

billfruit wrote: post #224
gsmecher wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great question but it's a little off-topic. I've been watching compressed sensing (CS) from the sidelines for the past decade, while wearing experimental-cosmology, synthetic-aperture RADAR, and instrumentation/FPGA hats. (Not electrodynamics or optics, per your question, but nearby.) Here's my perspective. If you're doing compressed sensing correctly, it transforms the entire instrument from electrically c…

So I gather that CS requires new types of instrument typologies and know-how, till we see it deployed more widely. I am though ever in awe of the hype that ML/NNs are getting for the past 2-3 years, where as Compressed-Sensing is likely to be a more fundamental shift in many fields.

I'd argue the opposite.

Vanilla CS theory assumes a very simple system model for the measurement process (ie, linear measurement) and shows that with a few assumptions you need far fewer measurements than you might expect. This by itself is a valuable observation.

However, I'm less impressed with CS as a practical tool because in many realistic systems the measurement process is nonlinear and difficult to model. That is, the desired system state you're trying to infer is some nonlinear function of the experimentally measured quantities.

I think the best instruments of the future will use CS ideas to motivate the use of an appropriate sensor domain to reduce the number of measurements required. But that actual computational reconstructions of system state (ie, inference) will be done with a nonlinear differentiable model which can be optimized using a data driven approach and with ML-like tools.

In addition to the benefit of allowing nonlinearities, this approach gives you a lot of freedom to optimize the computational complexity of the reconstruction (ie, complexity of the system model) vs accuracy of the results.

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

#279

Post by throwawy201903 »

I work on developing the ground system software that process scientific satellite data for a space physics mission at NASA. They give us a lot of freedom to balance emerging techniques from data-intensive computing backends (things like containers, queuing systems, worker pools) with some fairly sophistical numerical algorithms and statistical learning techniques. It is a challenging and rewarding blend of hardware engineering, software engineering, mathematics, and science. The experience of some of the people I work with is amazing.

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

#280

Post by da-bacon »

MLWithPhil wrote: post #275
da-bacon wrote: post #261

I currently work on the software that runs Google's quantum computers. To paraphrase the Talking Heads: How did I get there? PhD 2001 in physics, working on quantum computation. Postdocs at Caltech and Santa Fe Institute, then landed a research faculty position at the University of Washington. Yeah, raise your own funds! Jumped ship in 2011 (burnout, quality of life, university not caring about quantum computing) and…

Very cool stuff. To what extent would you recommend people study the underlying physics of QM, vs. the more domain specific content of quantum computing?

I'd say start with the quantum computing specific stuff and then add the physics. It will make some of the quantum physics stuff easier, I think.
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