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

You can do a 4 hour average week though: Just do a year of 60 hour weeks then quit and live off that money for 14 years.

I graduated with a bachelor's in Physics 10 years ago, but I have been working as an actuary for the past 8 years.

Navigating the politics and culture of the academic world never really made sense to me, and at the time I felt that I was not smart enough to ever really make a meaningful contribution to Physics.

I do not regret studying physics; I think the mental stimulation and growth I gained from those challenging 4 years of study have served me very well and actually made me a smarter human. However, I am happy to apply the logical rigor and analytical skills I learned to more simple and immediate problems in business.

There are plenty of ways to make a living and still be a net positive for society. I wasn't shaming him, but I'd love to raise my children in a culture where the focus is helping not just yourself and your possibly undeserving offspring (e.g, the university bribery scandal or countless other instances of corruption), but the rest of humanity as well. I think we'd all be a lot better off.

But at least this guy is honest about his goals.

Anecdote time!

Back in 2007, I was writing my diploma thesis (think master's just twice as long, German system prior to bachelor/master) at Auger. The collaboration has a rule that for the first year in, you don't go into the author list, but stay on it for a year after you leave. That optimizes for having the actual contributors on papers. Towards the end of my not-on-the-papers year, the collaboration published a really big paper on correlations between the arrival directions of the highest energy cosmic rays, and certain objects, active galactic nuclei (giant black holes at the center of other galaxies). This didn't just get published in Science, it made it to the cover. It was a step towards working out where these mysterious particles are coming from, and what mechanism might possibly exist to accelerate them to such energies! I was kind of bummed not to have my name on that paper (though even at the time thought the one year rule made sense).

The publication had been hotly debated internally. It had received all conceivable internal scrutiny (the author list contained over four hundred names). There had been a stark debate about what the right statistical significance was for claiming a discovery. Astronomers were used to less rigorous requirements than the particle physicists that together made up the collaboration. Ultimately, it was decided to claim a correlation. (A nil result would have been published as well.)

Almost from the day of publication, the statistical significance of the result, but in data continuously collected since, started to diminish. I was involved in running the nightly data reconstruction, and often times we would huddle around one of the workstations on the morning, to check whether a new high energy event increased or decreased the significance. It kept going the "wrong" way.

The collaboration went into a frenzy to double check everything. They redid the calculations, checked all hardware (a field of water tanks and electronics 3000km^2). Had lots of internal conferences with heated debates.

Ultimately a note was published describing the staggering decline of significance. If I remember correctly, my name was on the author list by then and I got to joke that I knew it all along.

I'm no longer in the field. Since then, the collaboration has published a di-polar asymmetry of the arrival directions of the highest energy cosmic rays. That proves something we already pretty much knew: these are not particles from our galaxy. That was a meaningful discovery. But I'm not aware of a publication with as exuberant a discovery as the source correlation.

Thank you!