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

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81–90 of 333 posts

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

#81

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…

> I worked as a computer guy for an academic department and that was fun and I'm trying to get back into it

Pick up a copy of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

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

#82
post #68

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…

I will take a look at it, thanks. I have tried some off the shelf OCR things and had little success. But what I do is really needle in the haystack kind of thing. I am looking for a "U" or and "Sr" in a particular place and happy to find one in a thousand pdf pages.

I am looking into auto-scrolling pdfs and batch loading, sequencing of pdfs to make things easier. But I will definitely check out fast.ai - thanks!

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

#84
Realized during my first postdoc that I wasn't going to make faculty in my desired geography, so took a second postdoc to buy time to figure out how to pivot. Worked at a couple hardware startups that didn't work out (one failed and one had R&D eliminated by acquiring company). After the second layoff, with a 5 month old, I looked to transition to something in my city (NYC) that was far more stable and safe.

Now I do data "science", and create data products.

The main downside is that now that I don't have a lab, but only a laptop, my eyesight has changed dramatically :) Upside is pay and work/life balance.

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

#85

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…

Sorry for the aside, but... Haskell gang represent!

Yo!

As a further aside, I do get to do some fun graphics in R and I'm pretty impressed how R has become the statistical standard and graphics too, mainly I think from one super dynamic statistician.

Now that R is entrenched I can work on moving everyone into Haskell!

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

#87

(PhD, 1996 in general relativity) Embedded graphics drivers for real-time systems. I keep the physics part of my brain alive by developing physics based Unity assets (nbodyphysics.com) and supporting a package for GR on github (grtensor). I still buy WAY too many physics books. Current aspiration is to work through "Modern Classical Physics" Thorne/Blandford.

I know what you mean on keeping the physics part alive. I've written a bunch of code for doing simple molecular dynamics and varying the interaction types. I've also gone off and discovered I like number theory.

None of this pays the bills, right now I help build clouds, and I used to build supercomputers, and high performance storage systems.

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

#88
I have a PhD in physics and worked as a post-doc for a few years, until I left for industry a couple of weeks ago. The last project I was busy with is developing a massively parallelized image simulation code for scanning transmission electron microscopy. It is open sourced here: www.stemsalabim.de

My new job in industry is consulting about HPC systems in the context of computer aided engineering.

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

#89
Just defended my PhD thesis in medical physics. Worked on radiation therapy treatment planning, which combines optimisation theory with the physics of Monte Carlo particle transport engines (and more macro energy deposition modeling as well) to simulate millions of different radiation dose distributions in patients and figure out which combination will lead to the right outcome based on what the radiation oncologist prescribes.

People in my field are fairly fortunate as there is a career track as a clinical medical physicist that is highly paid and pretty low stress, so most people end up going there. The work consists of maintaining and calibrating the radiation therapy machines, along with implementing new technologies in the clinic, and fixing problems that don't fall within the job description of the radiation therapists. Like what to do when a radioactive seed falls on the floor instead of going inside the patient where it's supposed to go. There's also a separate track as an imaging physicist where you maintain and QA the diagnostic imaging machines.

I'm personally doing a postdoc at the junction between optimisation, machine learning and radiation therapy. Just starting out though. Basically just extending my PhD work to automate the treatment planning process and remove the variability in treatment plan quality due to the level of experience of the people making the plans.

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

#90
post #41

Physicist, working as a physicist (PhD 2015). Precision tests of gravity, primarily. We test the equivalence principle, Newton's inverse square law, hunt for exotic forms of dark matter, and build/invent cutting-edge sensors for LIGO. I have begun looking about at jobs outside of academia in order to decide whether to stay or go. Data science is one of the easiest transitions a physicist with data-analysis can make,…

> We test [...] Newton's inverse square law

Imagine taking Newton down in the Replication Crisis Wars!

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