Are you happy being a Physicist?

twofish-quant

I happen to believe that history is largely determined by the actions of people, so there is a lot of randomness and a lot depends on the decisions that people make. I also believe that the "more you sweat, the less you bleed." One reason I'm optimistic about the Chinese economy is paradoxically because everyone is worried about the Chinese economy. There are about a dozen things that can kill Chinese economic growth, but people are worried about them and so people will do stuff to fix them. Conversely, when you hear people being too optimistic, that's a sign to be pessimistic.

Survivorship bias. (i.e. first rule of finance, don't mistake luck for skill)

There are numerous cases in which people have predicted the decline of the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Argentina, China, and the Soviet Union, and they were *right*. If you take N countries and then put together a set of random events that causes them to collapse, then just by random chance, one of those countries is going to "magically" survive, and whoever magically survives is going to win the game.

However, the mistake is to then go back and then assume that because you were lucky, that you end up somehow *destined* for greatness. Because you flipped heads, eight times in a row, you shouldn't assume that this proves that the ninth time things will come out heads.

One thing that worries me is that when things get bad, the *first* people that leave are the risk-takers and entrepreneurs. The thing that worries me is that Chinese people that are packing up and ending in China are the people that would have started companies in the US in the 1980's and 1990's. They are starting them in China. (And it looks like the same thing is happening in India.)

Once you have people leave, then the universities will start to fall apart. It's not going to be a fast process (it will take decades), but it's going to happen unless people decide that it's not.

1) You don't have a decade to fix the problem. Right now the US is not going into a long term Japanese spiral, but it's headed in that direction. Every year that the employment situation doesn't improve is one more year of "brain drain." If you wait a decade before the problem gets fixed then all of your Ph.D.'s and entrepreneurs are going to end up overseas.

Also skills rot. If you have a particle physicist that ends up working as a waiter, then ten years when the physics jobs open up, they are going to be unqualified for them.

2) You could have full employment in six months if the political will were there. You could *easily* have full employment for physics Ph.D.'s if American politicians decided it was a good thing. It's possible for the US to just say, every physics Ph.D gets a job at a government lab doing whatever research we think is good for the US.

What political leadership in China did in 2007 was to say "Good grief, we are about to have tens of millions of angry unemployed people tear us to pieces, what the heck can we do?" Answer: Build 10,000 km of high speed rail. Now it's a crappy, unsafe system, but that means more jobs for safety inspectors. In 2011, the economy looked like it was too overheated. So what the political leadership did was to slow things down. All of the railway projects that were scheduled to be finished in 2012 were delayed until 2015. Now it looks like the economy is slowing a bit too much, so that some of the projects that were delayed until 2015 are going to get moved to 2013.

The idea of using government spending to set up employment was not invented in China. An Englishman, Keynes figured it out.

Right now, my big hope is that people will just get fed up and start demonstrating. I was really happy that "occupy wall street" was going on, and I'm sad that the demonstrations have died down. Alternatively, I'm hoping that there will be some Sputnik event that "wakes people up."

twofish-quant

I think it's good for that.


No there isn't, but as long as there is *something* out there that is not totally awful, things will work. Just from random chance, something out there will work.

There is a trade-off between "money" and "enjoyment." If something was totally fun, you wouldn't have to pay people to do it. Part of the reason that companies emphasize "fun" is honestly so that they can pay you less to do the work. The reason that physics Ph.D.'s make more money doing finance than physics, is that physics Ph.D.'s don't want to do mathematical finance, so you have to pay them more.

The big bottleneck in getting a Ph.D. physics job in finance is geography. You have to move to a major money center like NYC, London, Hong Kong, or Singapore. Some people hate NYC. I turned out to like it.

Not true. Investment bankers are not into charity. The reason that they hire theoretical physicists is that the basic equations of finance are the exact same ones you find in astrophysics. It's really cool. It's also cool *why* the equations are the same.

Most of the jobs in finance essentially involve plugging numbers into spreadsheets. However, if you want someone to think about *why* those equations are what they are, then you need someone that is skilled at mathematically modelling complex systems, often through partial differential equations. Hmmm......

Finance Ph.D. very rarely use partial differential equations (although they use a lot of ordinary differential equations).

Neil Armstrong spent three days on the moon after a decade in which hundreds of thousands of people put them there.

Also at least in my case, the Ph.D. is immortal. My death notice is going to mention that I got a Ph.d., and it's going to be recorded in the family histories.

By whom?

Something that is true for me is that you get more social respect for doing things different, than doing things the same way.

You are right. From what I understand OP said he works hard "to be ahead of his peers" which means for me that he wants to be on top of his field.

Most people in China are poor. Most people in China don't want to stay poor, and if they can't get rich, then they'll have a revolution. Making a billion people rich involves a huge investment in science and technology.

twofish-quant

It's permanent for the people that lived through it. Yes, the US got out of the Great Depression, but living through the Great Depression did permanent effect the people that lived through it.

Also, what I'm worried about is Japan-style stagnation. Japan had a bubble pop in 1990, and it *still* hasn't recovered. Another bad example is Argentina circa 1900. Then there is the Russia.

Finally, history doesn't repeat. It rhymes but doesn't repeat. We are never going back to the 1990's because history just doesn't to into reverse.

Japan.

Also there is survivorship basis. Financial crashes cause political instability.

The other thing is that "eventually" may be a long time. The Chinese political and economic system crashed in the early 19th century, and it's taken two centuries to recover.

But the longer the recovery takes, the more "systemic damage" there is. What happens after a few years (and what happened to Japan) is that people just accept things as the "new normal."

The thing about Japan is that most people in Japan curiously aren't angry. They've just accepted, and it's really not too bad. Japan is clean, it's cozy, it's comfortable. But as a dynamic driver of the future, it's not.

twofish-quant

Also "negativity" isn't "pessimism." I'm often the most negative about things and people that I have the greatest affection for, because it's only be being extremely "negative" can you point out problems and do something about them.

None of the problems that the US has is (at least at this point) fatal, and everything can be fixed with political will. But to get people to *do* something, you have to start screaming and being extremely negative.

What I *don't* believe is that the problems with the US economy are "self-correcting".

twofish-quant

Nope. Observations are observations.

If I don't see X, then I don't see X. Now, *why* I don't see X is another issue, and if you are arguing that I'm living in a bubble, that might be a good explanation. I'm just a frog in the well. Also, being human, I'm an unreliable narrator. I misremember and misinterpret things so trying to figure out what is going on is difficult. (Keeping a written diary is cool, because you find out that how you remember something at time X, is *radically* different than how you remember it at time Y).

There's selection bias, survivorship bias, cognitive bias.

Trying to sort out all of the biases to figure out what is really going on is the type of stuff that you do in astrophysics, and sometimes the biases are as interesting as the thing that you are studying. To a cosmologist, interstellar reddening is bias, but to a ISM researcher, that's what they are trying to study.

But then trying to figure the nature of the bubble turns out to be useful. Something that has occurred to me is that my university might just (for whatever reason) do a dynamite job of post-career training, in which case someone might look to see what my university is doing.

I can say that my career outcome doesn't seem that unusual among Ph.D. graduates of my university because there is a professor that tracks these things. However, to have a professor track student outcomes would create an obvious selection bias (i.e. universities with professors that track alumni would be expected to have better outcomes than people that don't.)

Some other factors is that I graduated when the job market was good. I also have much less resistance to relocation, so if I'm somewhere were the job market is bad, I'm going to leave for greener pastures. I also did research that happens to be particularly marketable. I also like boring work, but I hate being silo'ed which means I study a lot of history and politics.

So I'm not an "average physics Ph.d." On the other hand, I don't think that an "average" physics Ph.D. really exists. Everyone has a different story, and outcomes from different people might be markedly different.

Getting back to physics (so that the moderators don't kill the discussion).....

One thing that does influence the way that I look at the world is the type of research that I did. I studied supernova. I didn't study electrons. This makes a difference, because it turns out that every electron is the same as every other electron. On the other hand, every single supernova is different than every other supernova. One thing that's cool is that you can show a spectra and a light curve for a supernova to a observationalist, and they can figure out exactly which supernova it is.

So you can talk about an "average" electron, but you can't talk about an "average" supernova. Yes there are similarities (most people have two eyes), but talking about averages is not a good idea. And paradoxically, saying that there are no universals is not a universal statement. It turns out that there is little variability in Ia maximum light.

So in trying to figure out people, I don't think in terms of averages.

And this is all stuff that I learned in my seven-years as a Ph.D., and I don't think it was a "waste of time."

atyy

Sounds great! I assume the worst would be much worse than Japan.

chill_factor

The system is extremely good and safe actually. The German accident in 1998 killed 3 times as many people, despite Germany having much more experience with high speed rail and less than 1/3 the rail length. Indeed, the US had 20% of rail accidents from 2007-2012, India had 15%, and China had 4%. In insurance, don't you measure things by accidents per passenger-km? Well measured that way, China's rail system is one of the safest in the world (as opposed to India's system which is the most dangerous in terms of fatalities and 2nd most in terms of accidents).

What's the actual situation is that because the regime media says that the high speed rail is unsafe, points to one specific case that might as well be anecdotal evidence, and the out of touch people will say "It is so unsafe. We are the best and most free" like sheep.

phylotree

You have never seen an angry boss, haven't you ? It depends, different people different views.

chill_factor

Whether you're happy or not depends on your life goals and your own personality.

I'm completely OK with mediocrity as the result (but of course, always try hard with the precondition of mental and physical health), so I'm easily satisfied and have lots of patience with failure. Most of my classmates are the opposite: they are hypercompetitive and perfectionist. They'll either crack under the pressure, or they'll become the top elite.

I'm "cool with" a degree where I didn't learn much except got 5 years to play around with million dollar precision machinery. Some people are "cool with" only being a famous Nobel Prize winning theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard.

Seriously, physics isn't life. Some people truly love physics and for them, it is a lifestyle. I find it pretty nice, OK, I guess, not love. I don't wake up every day dreaming of sludging through QM problems and making the nth dilution and looking forward to Jackson. If you do, you're seriously destined for greatness.

So you need to ask yourself a question. First, what do you want? Second, how bad do you want it? Third, can you actually make the sacrifices you need to get it? Then you'll know if you'll be happy.

ParticleGrl

No, you aren't. The problem with physics is that being a top-notch physicist is no guarantee you can get a job doing physics. The job market is so tight that luck plays a major factor. Those guys who published nature papers in highschool and who spend 80 hours a week in the lab cranking out results are still most likely to end up working in insurance, finance,etc than working in physics.

In many jobs, being good at your job and working hard generally keeps you employed in the field- physics (and science in general) isn't like that. Being good at your job and working hard will land you a few postdocs, but its no guarantee of longer term employment.

If your goal is just study physics for a few years, then a phd is fine. If you want to work as a university professor, a physics phd is probably a bad idea. If you want to do scientific research for a living, you can probably find a more certain field than physics.

twofish-quant

The worst would be that we get hit by an asteroid.

But the purposes of planning out my life, the worst case scenario I can think of is that the US undergoes permanent Japanese style stagnation. The reason I think it's a likely scenario is that I can imagine a situation in which people in the United States just get used to the "new normal" and just accept that "this is as good as it gets." If we get to 50% unemployment, there would be a revolution, but a permanent unemployment rate of 8% could be "normal."

What's wrong with that? For some people, nothing. For me, everything.

I was raised with the idea of the "frontier." The Old West in which someone with a sense of ambition and adventure could go into the wild unknown and carve off a piece of land for themselves. People talk about the "frontiers of science" and there is Star Trek, which talks about space being the "final frontier." If you drive into West Texas along I-10 and head toward the McDonald Observatory, you can *feel* the spirit of the Old West and of the idea of Manifest Destiny.

So what really worries me is not that people in the US will end up eating tree bark. What worries me is that overtime, people will "get used" to diminished expectations, and that there will be damage to the American character.

I'm not worried that China will plant a flag in the moon before the US. I'm worried that China will plant a flag on the moon, and by the time that happens, no one in the US will care.

twofish-quant

There are two problems with saying that things will eventually get better.

The first is that it's not "actionable". I know I'm going to die eventually. I care about when and how, because knowing that I'm going to behave very differently based on whether I think I have three days, three months, three years, or three decades to live. Similarly, from the point of view of "what do I do with my life" it makes a big difference whether the economy will improve in three months or ten years.

The second is that the statement that things will get better is not falsifiable. Suppose that the US stays in a depression for 200 years. That doesn't falsify the idea that things will "eventually" get better. Things get stuck for 200 years, maybe next year will be the magic year.

The problem is that if you believe that things will eventually get better if you do nothing, then that makes it impossible to consider the possibility that you just got the situation wrong. So how long are you willing to wait before you consider the possibility that things just won't get better? 10 months? 3 years? 10 years? And what do you do in the mean time?

Curiously, this is relevant to astrophysics. One thing that makes astrophysics a nice "fit" to finance is that you are dealing with one time events that cannot be experimented on. So you end up considering all sorts of philosophical issues.

One trick is to set up falsifibility conditions. I expect to see X, Y, and Z on dates A, B, and C. If I don't see X, Y, and Z, then I got something wrong. Also X, Y and Z can't be probabilistic. If I say based on my model of the universe, there is a 10% chance of this happening, and it doesn't happen, what does that mean? (One thing that I find interesting is that in talking about China, people often use the subjective. The Communist Party may collapse because of X. What exactly is that supposed to mean?)

In fact, the predicted events never match up with the actual events so I always get something wrong, but the hope is that it's not serious, and when dealing with public policy, you want to make sure that even if you get something wrong, or very wrong, the world doesn't blow up.

I did this back in 2007. I wrote down, I expect X to happen, and if X doesn't happen by date Y, then I'll conclude Z. One thing that I expected to happen was that the US economy could bounce back without much Keynesian stimulus, and I wrote down dates by which I expected that to happen. Those dates passed, so obvious I got something wrong.

ZapperZ

This thread has meander quite a bit, and it needs to come back to the OP or it will be closed.

Coming back to the original question, my answer is YES, I am extremely happy being a physicist. I look forward to going to work almost every single morning, and practically every single day challenges my creativity, not just in terms of physics, but also in terms of dealing with people and bureaucracies (I'm in charge of safety issues for our facility).

Would I recommend it as a career? ABSOLUTELY, but with a major caveat that you go into pursuing it with eyes wide open and not be seduced with the "sexiness" of the field. This is very important because if you go into it with some lofty ideals, you will set yourself up for disappointment because you did not prepare yourself for the possibility that you might not make it as a physicist, either due to academics, or due to lack of jobs in a particular field.

BTW, isn't it implicitly a criteria that a person responding to this topic should be a practicing physicist? Otherwise, one is simply responding based on ignorance or some superficial idea of what a physicist should think.

Zz.

Mépris

Does chill_factor's description above "fit" you, if not exactly, then loosely? Do you know physicists or students (grad or undergrad) who'd fit that description? More importantly, are the people who tend to do "better" (by the usual standards of academia; which I guess is a high citations to publications ratio, with the number of publications being quite "high"?) like what c_f described?

[I understand he might have exaggerated a little to put his point across]

ZapperZ

The description given is really isn't reality. We don't "work" to solve Jackson's problems. We work to solve problems that we are faced with. After all, why go into physics if all you want to do is worked on SOLVED problem? The whole point of being a physicist, or a scientist/engineer is that one is interested in tackling things that are still not known, or not know well. I don't wake up wanting to solve Jackson's problem. I wake up to tackle the issue on why, upon UV illumination, the work function for the photocathode that I mad dropped temporarily. I get up each morning thinking on how to design a photodetector fabrication system to allow for an easy vacuum transfer.

In many of these types of questions, I often see a very jaundice, idealized, and often mistaken view of what a physicist does. Besides the fact that the type of field one goes into often is a major factor in dictating what one does, the nature of the job often changes throughout one's career!

Zz.

StatGuy2000

Let's take each of the individual points you mentioned and examine them for a moment. Firstly, in each of the countries that you have mentioned, only the Soviet Union has truly disintegrated, for reasons that were partly economic, partly political (the Soviet Union was a union of disparate "nations" or ethnic groups whose only true common set of identity was oppression under the rule of the Communist Party, and the czarist regime prior to that, with a strong wellspring of nationalist resentment simmering under the surface -- a situation that the US does not face). Argentina has never truly "declined", as its economy has bounced from extreme highs and lows (more often than not lows, due in no small part to the political situation) in very short periods of time repeatedly over its history as an independent nation.

China, as you well know, while still a poor country, is on the rise economically with a rising middle class. The UK, France and Germany are all still relatively prosperous countries with a high standard of living (in spite of the current problems in the EU).

Now you cite the example of Japan as a nation that is "stagnating" and indeed it was true during the 1990's. I would not draw too many parallels between the US and Japan, for Japan has never experienced as significant a rise in unemployment that the US has faced. Japan is also a nation whose working population is declining due to a low birth rate, so even if Japan may not rise economically to the peaks of the past, it has gained enough prosperity for a shrinking populace that there is less pain felt per individual (hence lack of anger at the populace for its economic situation). These are characteristics the US will not face (due to immigration and higher birth rates) so there is greater scope for the US to revive, as new workers come into the fore with new skills & ideas.

As far as your point about risk takers and entrepreneurs leaving (specifically Chinese and Indians in the US leaving), it's worth keeping in mind that these are people who left China and India for the US more often than not because opportunities in their home countries were limited (some like your family left for political reasons as well, but for the moment let's leave that aside). These are people that, under different circumstances, will likely would have preferred to stay in their home country, so now that opportunities are growing in their countries of origin, I don't see it as a negative that they choose to return.

I would also point out that the US continues to accept immigrants from all over the world (although at a somewhat reduced rate than the past), and these people, in addition to educated native-born Americans, will become the risk takers and entrepeneurs of the future
(i.e. the next Mark Zuckerberg, who I might add is neither Chinese nor Indian).

You do raise the point that survivor bias may play a factor, but the point I'm emphasizing is that there are enough differences between the US and other nations in its characteristics that the pessimism that is so frequently expressed in the mass media.

Andy Resnick

I make my living as a physicist, and I think chill-factor's description is exactly wrong. Once you are out of school, nobody cares how well you can do something that's already been done. That sort of work is more properly called 'training', and is useful and necessary only as part of a scientist's education.

I wake up every day excited about doing something new. I get paid to play with toys. I have time to read and ponder, and the freedom to ponder what I choose to. David Stern wrote an opinion column in Physics Today some time ago ("All I really need to know...") that ends on a perfect note:

"Being a physicist is a great privilege. Be worthy of it. Most of humanity spends its life doing boring repetitive tasks."