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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?

#31

Post by Insanity »

criddell wrote: post #15
Insanity wrote: post #7

I'm not a physicist but studied physics before jumping to programming. A surprising amount of people whom I studied with ended up as programmers themselves, after finishing the physics degree.

Are you happy with the path you took? Are you still happy with the time you spent studying physics?

Absolutely, but I had been programming before entering uni and got most joy out of programming related courses.

But I enjoyed my time as a physics student. Physics is an interesting field to study even if you don't end up working in it, in my opinion. :)

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

#32

Post by Anon84 »

tw1010 wrote: post #4
ktpsns wrote: post #2

Academic trends are ruled by money. In theoretical physics, computer simulations is where the money is. For the students, that means they are doing computer science related work, frequently the physics part is lacking. The route to leaving physics and using the data science capabilities is then a straightforward one.

Is it really bad that most time is invested in simulations? Seems like a very potent low-hanging fruit (not to mention how many cool things could come out of it).

Depends on what you enjoy doing. I spent a lot of time doing magnetic simulations during the earlier period of my PhD and the reason for doing them isn't that the theory can't explain what will happen, but rather that we don't have the mathematical chops to actually calculate it, so we build little artificial worlds and try to take measurements the old fashion way.

This was certainly a lot fun, but you won't be getting any thing particularly revolutionary out of it. I remember my advisor at the time running a few dozen CPUs of our poor excuse for a cluster (built mostly by yours truly with off the shelf components) for the entire summer to add a couple of digits to the ground level energy estimate of a completely artificial magnetic model :)

On the bright side, it taught me a lot about programming, numerical simulation and optimization

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

#33

Post by dhruvmittal »

dhruvmittal wrote: post #26

Money aside, there is a sort of more systematic reason we see physics MS/PhDs bailing to industry. Though theory groups in general tend to use computational simulations as a tool to complete calculations, groups that develop novel computational methods and techniques tend to be headed by younger, more junior professors. These groups are typically well-funded and do very exciting (trendy? cutting edge?) work with dist…

And to answer the question, (MS 2016 Condensed Matter Theory), Did risk assessment for two years, now I simulate systems of systems.

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

#34

Post by [deleted] »

dphidt wrote: post #28

I am a physicist working as a physicist! My field of experimental particle physics, at least, is very hacker-ey: we develop instrumentation hardware, low-level data acquisition software, database and web apps for experiment operations and monitoring, and the like, beyond the data analysis. Of course, there are many industry opportunities for people with this kind of experience. In addition to the issues pointed out i…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

shifto wrote: post #19
majewsky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first degree was in physics as well, and I also ended up in IT. At SAP, to be exact. Urban legend among German SAP employees has it that SAP expands to "Sammelplatz arbeitsloser Physiker" (gathering place for unemployed physicists).

I know a few people at SAP (NL/DE) who are overqualified for the job they are doing and seem bored/uninterested. What's an insiders perspective of this?

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by davrosthedalek »

(PhD 2010 in Nuclear Physics) I stayed in Academia, right now I'm trying to survive the first year as an Assistant Professor. Teaching is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. My research is two fold: One half of my research is focused on precision measurements of the proton form factors (proton radius puzzle, form factor ratio puzzle), the other half on streaming readout for next-gen experiments.

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

#38

Post by Misdicorl »

dhruvmittal wrote: post #26

Money aside, there is a sort of more systematic reason we see physics MS/PhDs bailing to industry. Though theory groups in general tend to use computational simulations as a tool to complete calculations, groups that develop novel computational methods and techniques tend to be headed by younger, more junior professors. These groups are typically well-funded and do very exciting (trendy? cutting edge?) work with dist…

I don't think you're necessarily wrong re: difficulty getting prestigious post docs after graduating from a young lab in a newer field, but I think you're way overselling it's importance.

The fundamental issue is the field is not growing (very much). Each professor will graduate 20-50 students over their career, but only one will get their job when they retire (on average).

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

#39

Post by vanderZwan »

Anon84 wrote: post #25
vanderZwan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of reminds me of what Jeff Hawkins once claimed was the issue with making sense of how the brain works: > So why don't we have a good theory of brains? People have been working on it for 100 years. Let's first take a look at what normal science looks like. This is normal science. Normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists. The theorist guy says, "I think this is what's going on," t…

> Not that physics has no theories, but I dropped out of studying physics myself over a decade ago, and at that time it felt a lot like the balance in physics has shifted towards having to measure and process disproportionate amounts of data with so much precision that has to be automated, or like you said do a ton of really complicated modelling. It feels a bit "stuck" that way. The reason for is just how damn good…

> The reason for is just how damn good all the Physics Theory is.

> (majewski's comment below) I think you're seeing this in physics because, in terms of experimental accessibility, the low-hanging fruit are mostly picked.

I mean, yes and no. The Standard Model is amazing. But I think we're also kind of focused too much on the Big Questions, and in the arena of the not-so-big questions there are still a ton of gaps and missing insights.

Perhaps in the not-so-big questions, most of the low-hanging fruit may appear to be picked as well, but I suspect that is more a kind of myopia that can be solved by collaborating outside of our field.

Whenever I see an article these days about physics that really excites me, it tends to be a story where one or more physicists got excited about a seemingly small question, or ate a bit of humble pie and joined forces with chemists, biologists or some other field, and or both, and that working it out turned out to bring far-reaching consequences and novel insights. Same with maths, really.

I'm aware this is completely personal of course, and that there is a likely bias in that this kind of research tends to be more accessible and thus more fun to read for me, but still.

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