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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?

#301

Post by madhadron »

scottishcow wrote: post #281
madhadron wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a similar issue with power laws in biology, mostly driven by a guy named Barabasi. I don't think any of his results have held up when someone did the math right, but he's gone so far as to try to politically pressure people to keep quiet about it because they were hurting his career. I've been out for a few years, so I don't know what the current state of affairs is.

Surprised to hear this about Barabasi, I'm no physicist but enjoyed reading his books on network science as a layperson. Is there any published criticism against his work? His papers get cited everywhere, I know citations are more metric of popularity than scientific quality but I find it puzzling that his work continues to get attention if the results don't hold up.

You could start with Pachter's sendup (https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-network-non...), and the Wikipedia article on Barabasi has a short section on criticisms. I read his work, figured out it was nonsense, and put him on the list of authors whose papers I automatically threw in the garbage. Kim Lewis is another one of those.

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

#302

Post by pontifier »

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…

Any chance you'd be interested in talking to me about a device I am working on and am trying to evaluate? Your knowledge of accelerator physics would probably give you good insights about problems it may have.

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

#303

Post by domlebo70 »

bgibson wrote: post #294
domlebo70 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hijack the OP, but I am interested in companies in NYC doing Haskell. Would you mind sharing?

Sure, the two I had in mind in NYC are Kadena ( http://kadena.io ) and Jane St. ( https://www.janestreet.com ). Jane St. is more an OCaml shop but they like Haskell people. Kadena builds everything in Haskell.

Thanks. I know of these. I will apply.

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

#304

Post by pontifier »

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…

Would you be interested in talking to me about a new miniature particle collider device I've come up with? I haven't yet built a prototype, but I need to ensure that I gather the correct data to determine if it functions the way I believe it will.

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

#305

Post by pontifier »

jberger1613 wrote: post #245

PhD in 2012, Theoretical high energy particle physics. Now I work optimizing fantasy sports teams and building websites that display betting lines. Don't even like sports and I have no idea what anyone in the office is talking about, but they are paying a lot for me to put buttons on their website I guess. Leaves me a bunch of room for my hobbies. Offered to do some actual math, maybe personalization algos or some AI…

Do you have any interest in talking with me about a fusion reactor I am working on? I'm sure you would have some valuable insights.

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

#306

Post by pontifier »

sballin wrote: post #188

I'm a PhD student studying turbulence at the outer edge of plasmas in fusion experiments. Turbulence degrades plasma confinement, which makes it difficult to keep the plasma burning and produce power. I'm interested in whether different machine designs or operation procedures can help reduce turbulence. At the moment I'm analyzing data from W7-X in Germany. It's a really cool device off the beaten path of tokamaks bu…

Any chance you'd like to chat with me about a new type of fusion device I'm working on? At low density the theory is more like a collider, but as density increases, it might become turbulent and disrupt the periodic motion I expect. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

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

#307

Post by mensetmanusman »

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…

Awesome, do you sneak in experiments on time crystals ;)

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

#308

Post by mensetmanusman »

dheera wrote: post #232

I was a dual physics/EE major at MIT for my undergrad. For my PhD at MIT I was in the EE department working on quantum and single-photon imaging. I now work on mostly computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. Robotics was a hobby of mine since high school, and is now my work. I'm still passionate about physics and physics research, but I'm not happy with the academic system of today, which encourages pursuing…

MIT alum here, found the materials science PhD route very rewarding (from a physics undergrad). You may have done research with K. Berggren it sounds like :)

I jumped into industry hoping to improve how the world makes things on a very large scale. Current project has potential to change how a ubiquitous product is made; it would be the first major manufacturing change in 80 years!

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

#309

Post by mensetmanusman »

jqgatsby wrote: post #141

I am not a physicist, but one thing I've noticed is that the physicists I know tend to be very good at Mathematica, and if they happen to transition to a data science role, then Mathematica is sort of this secret weapon that they have. I've been learning it for the first time recently, and there are data science problems that are somehow tractable in Mathematica that were very hard for me to do in Python. Some of thi…

Mathematica is amazing for visualizing math. 6 lines of readible mathematica code can compile into 100 lines of unreadable C.

Any blog posts on mathematica helping make data science problems more tractable?

My thoughts are mathematica is good at intuition building, but not fast enough to deploy without converting into subsequent languages.

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

#310

Post by mensetmanusman »

Libbum wrote: post #292

Finished my PhD in quantum computing three years ago now. My first post-doc was in laser-matter interactions. We had an experimental team that were focusing PWs of power on to ultra-thin films and separating the substance into its constituent parts (electrons and protons I mean). The plan was to increase the proton acceleration yields & make a consistent, tight bunch (in the energy spectra) so that we could use it fo…

What wavelength was the laser setup?
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