Physics Are you happy being a Physicist?

[George Jones]

Nevertheless, my idea of "decent" is just a one-room apartment (with kitchen and bathroom separate from bedroom) and having enough money to buy food and a library subscription with.

This is all I needed as a bachelor, but financial needs increase when one decides to have a family.

 

[ParticleGrl]

There is no denying that the impact of the financial crash is serious across many countries around the world, but to state that the effects are somehow permanent is both needlessly pessimistic and is not backed up by history.

But for people who graduated during these bad years, the effects on job/income will be permanent. If you've ever talked with people who came of age during the great depression, it cast a shadow over their entire lives.

Also, at the rate we are going, its something like a decade to full employment, and if Europe falls apart it could drag the US down with it which just further delays 'recovery'. The US may well be in an awful labor market for my entire 30s. Thats bound to hurt tons of people's early careers.

 

[StatGuy2000]

But for people who graduated during these bad years, the effects on job/income will be permanent. If you've ever talked with people who came of age during the great depression, it cast a shadow over their entire lives.

Also, at the rate we are going, its something like a decade to full employment, and if Europe falls apart it could drag the US down with it which just further delays 'recovery'. The US may well be in an awful labor market for my entire 30s. Thats bound to hurt tons of people's early careers.

ParticleGrl, I agree with you that for those graduates entering force during these past few years will possibly face long-term effects due to the fallout of the financial crisis of 2008 (in a manner not dissimilar to those who came of age during the Great Depression). What I'm arguing is that if we look at a long-term view, the financial crisis will not have a permanent negative effect on the US economy as a whole.

There has been much press lately about an increasing pessimism and negativity within the US, how American civilization is disintegrating, how the US is "losing its place" in the world (a pessimism that I see reflected even here in Physics Forums). What I'm arguing is that the pessimism underlying these statements are unwarranted. There has been numerous periods (including the 1930's) when people have predicted the decline of the US, only to see the nation not only recover, but take strong leadership in all spheres of the world. Frankly, I don't see how the current situation is any different.

The resources available to the US -- the enormous creativity of the people, a culture that is accepting of experimentation, risk-taking and entrepreneurship, the great universities, the resilience of the nation as a whole -- are considerable, and I am fundamentally optimistic that the US will once again rise up to its challenges, and with it new opportunities for future students.

Now as far as when this will occur, or at any rate when we will reach full employment -- well, it could take a decade, or it could be sooner, and this will partly depend on events in Europe, as well as other events in the world, and I do not wish to hazard a guess of when that would be.

 

[turbo]

I am not a physicist, but my happiest years as a consultant were when I was troubleshooting systems in pulp mills and paper machines. The hours were sometimes brutal, and required travel and absences from home, but the work was stimulating.

Part chemistry, part mechanical engineering, and part physics. I was not degreed in any of those disciplines, but 4 years in a brand-new pulp mill as a process chemist and 6 more years as the top operator of a very sophisticated high-speed paper machine teaches you stuff you can't possibly learn in college.

 

[twofish-quant]

What I'm arguing is that if we look at a long-term view, the financial crisis will not have a permanent negative effect on the US economy as a whole.

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.

What I'm arguing is that the pessimism underlying these statements are unwarranted. There has been numerous periods (including the 1930's) when people have predicted the decline of the US, only to see the nation not only recover, but take strong leadership in all spheres of the world. Frankly, I don't see how the current situation is any different.

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.

The resources available to the US -- the enormous creativity of the people, a culture that is accepting of experimentation, risk-taking and entrepreneurship, the great universities, the resilience of the nation as a whole -- are considerable, and I am fundamentally optimistic that the US will once again rise up to its challenges, and with it new opportunities for future students.

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.

Now as far as when this will occur, or at any rate when we will reach full employment -- well, it could take a decade, or it could be sooner, and this will partly depend on events in Europe, as well as other events in the world, and I do not wish to hazard a guess of when that would be.

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]

It really depends. I have always wanted to have a work which uses my creativity and imagination to the greatest extend. Science turned out to be bad for that.

I think it's good for that.

Yes but most people study physics because they want to do physics (if not in academia then in industry). If they wanted to do finance/programming they would study it. You like working in finance because it's similar to physics in some aspects but there is no guarantee that somebody else will enjoy working in finance/oil and gas because he/she is physics major.

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.

I think that there are many people like ParticleGrl who would prefer engineering/applied physicist jobs over finance. If they knew that getting HEP PhD leads them to finance they would choose different field or branch of physics.

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.

So yes there are well-paid jobs* that you can get with physics degree

*but they often have nth to do with physics

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).

If you do research afterwards then yes - it's not a waste of time. But if you spend 7+ years to master the skill which you won't use for the rest of your life it is. Life is too short for that.

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.

If you don't go standard route you are always considered to be a failure.

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.

My country is poor, most people are poor and they don't feel rich because they earn a little more than they peers.

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]

There is no denying that the impact of the financial crash is serious across many countries around the world, but to state that the effects are somehow permanent is both needlessly pessimistic and is not backed up by history

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.

It may take many years, but the majority of developed nations with stable political institutions who have experienced financial crashes in the past do eventually recover from them.

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.

One can look at the US example, where the economy is slowly recovering with more jobs being made available. The pace of recovery may be slow, and job creation may not be sufficient to lower the unemployment rate substantially as of this time, but the US will recover economically.

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]

Then clearly there aren't any.

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]

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.

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

 

[chill_factor]

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."

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]

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.

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]

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.

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 high school 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]

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

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 question goes out to all those currently making a living doing physics.

I just finished up my junior year with a 4.0 GPA, I'm currently on my third research project, and right now it seems the default course of action is to go to grad school, get a PhD and pursue a career in Physics.

I have one major hesitation though, and that is whether or not I'm really going to be happy if I choose a career in Physics. I know that to really be successful in any field, you have to devote most of you time and much of your energy to it, there is the constant pressure to publish, to secure funding, to meet department expectations etc...

It seems like as much of a rewarding experience as it can be, a career in Physics requires a lot of sacrifice. Are successful physicists really happy people? What about the unsuccessful ones?

I know many of the great Physicists had troubled personal lives, and sometimes I see hints of this in my Physics professors whom I've gotten to know a bit. I work very hard right now because I want to get ahead of my peers, but I don't want to live my life like this forever. I want to make decent money and be successful, but I also want a family, I want to travel and have new experiences, I want to live in the mountains and grow a garden... basically, I want to be able to earn money, but I don't think I'm willing to go into a career that demands more of me than that. I don't want to be wealthy, I want to make enough money so that I can live my life freely, and I don't want the burden of responsibility always tying me down.

That being said, would you, the successful (or not) physicist recommend a career in physics?

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]

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.

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).

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]

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."

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]

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]

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."

 

[mayonaise]

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

After my time in HEP, I concluded most of work in HEP extremely boring and repetitive. Mostly my time was spent configuring packages made by lousy physicist/part-time programmers, running days of simulations to get enough statistics, fine-tuning cuts to lower some upper bound by 5%. So this is on the low level, but even on the higher level, months of this work is just spent to re-measure some branching ratio because more data was collected. Then you publish a paper describing how you did things not-so-differently, but due to the higher statistics, you get a more accurate result.

Now imagine that a typical experiment takes as much as decades of data.

For me, the "non-boring, non-repetitive" rosy image of physics has long since burned.

 

[ZapperZ]

After my time in HEP, I concluded most of work in HEP extremely boring and repetitive. Mostly my time was spent configuring packages made by lousy physicist/part-time programmers, running days of simulations to get enough statistics, fine-tuning cuts to lower some upper bound by 5%. So this is on the low level, but even on the higher level, months of this work is just spent to re-measure some branching ratio because more data was collected. Then you publish a paper describing how you did things not-so-differently, but due to the higher statistics, you get a more accurate result.

Now imagine that a typical experiment takes as much as decades of data.

For me, the "non-boring, non-repetitive" rosy image of physics has long since burned.

Or maybe you weren't prepared or didn't realize that being in HEP involves doing mostly that!

I spent a summer in between my Junior and Senior year interning at Fermilab, and what I saw first hand sealed my decision on NOT doing high energy physics. And every time I hear on here of kids who haven't seen what is the reality in many of these fields wanting to do "theory" or "particle physics", I cringe. I'm not trying to stop anyone. But as I've said earlier, you need to go into this with eyes fully wide open and not simple based on the romanticized version of what you see on TV or what you perceived it is.

If students who wish to go into physics in this forum get to realize that (i) physics is such a huge field (ii) different areas offers different nature of work and (iii) many areas of physics offers such a tremendous job opportunities compare to the ones that most people are familiar with, then we have done a tremendous service already.

Zz.

 

[Rika]

I think it's good for that.

That's why different people are suitable for different careers. Science is good for you because it's soothing you, for me it's bad because it drives me crazy. Gamedev is good for me but for you it may not. There are dozens of different people suitable for different stuff. That's how the world works.

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.

Yes but finance is still bad choice for many theoretical physicsists (especially those "paper and pen" ones). For you getting PhD is part of your lifestyle and that's fine but you can't say "PhD in theo physics was great for me so it'll be great for you too" because it's not true.

I find economy very interesting subject but it doesn't change the fact that for many physicists it's boring. For them even being a number crunching code monkey can be boring and the only thing that keeps them doing it is the fun factor - "knowing sth more about particle physics" is a reward for them. Reward that can't be trade-off with money.

Physics PhD is not a reward for everyone too. I also know several physics PhDs and they would choose engineering degree over physics it they could choose again (many of them actually did it). If you completely destroy the only fun factor that motives you it can turns out that you enjoy designing a car or new material more than babysitting super computers.

There is a trade-off between "money" and "enjoyment."

There is but it's not linear and totally different for every person. I don't want to be poor but with decent income I wouldn't trade fun factor for more decent income.

You also can't trade off 0 fun for insane amount of money (at least not in my case). If I could earn insane amount of money by your "pig farming" I would do this for 1-2 years so that I can save some money which could help me achive my goals. However I wouldn't like to do this until my retirement.

Well I know - at least in my country you can support your family with gamedev income (you are actually in top 10% of income) but you can't do this with physics. So I don't need to switch fields.

If something was totally fun, you wouldn't have to pay people to do it.

Not true. You pay people to do sth because you can earn much more money with their skills. That's why Wall Street pays for your skills and academia not. In current world you can get rich with market modelling but the same model for supernova won't get you single $.

Part of the reason that you pay ppl for sth even if it's fun for them it to get the work done. You can do some great stuff without money but it's an exception not the rule. There are things that you won't achive with people working for free no matter how hard you try. More or less if you do sth just for fun you do whatever you want whenever you want. You can get indie game/amateur astronomy done like this but it just won't work for Diablo 3 or Cern.

So you need to pay people so that they won't work on a whim. Now you can say that it's less fun but I don't agree. Sometimes it is sometimes it's not.

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 reason that physics Ph.D.'s make more money doing finance than physics, is that finance is a field which generates much more income than physics. You said before that PhD salary in finance is pretty standard. I think there are many people who see finance as their first choice and yet they earn much more than physicists. Finance isn't boring field. It's rich field so it can pay you more. If you work in applied branch of physics that generates money you don't earn peanuts too.

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

It's for the glory.

By whom?

By the "system".

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

Social respect only among people similar to you. Other won't trust you much.

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.

True but US, China, Russia, India, Brazil can afford it and need to do that mostly because they are huuge countries with maaany people like you said. All those countries are or have potential to be quite independent super-powers.

In Europe situation is very different through. You have so many so different (culture, tradition etc.) countries packed on small area. No wonder it's so messed up. Our government doesn't invest in science and technology, problem is solved in different way. About 30%-40% of our nation works abroad. I am not sure if I'm correct but I guess it's all about politics. China is big and that alone allows it to say "ok so now I'm going to invest in technology and become new-superpower". Small countries that are in economical and political union with local super-powers (Germany, France) can't do sth like that because we were meant to be an agriculture country with cheap labour force that supports economy of local super-powers.
Super-powers wouldn't like another super-power next to them and they really need someone who will take care of their old people or gather stuff from their plantations. They even need medical doctors and engineers so we can't have great industry, research unis or pay a lot to our doctors. Now the scary part is that crisis didn't hit us hard. It didn't and yet we are poor and stagnant. The sign of being "developing country" is that you develop and if we aren't it can mean that we've reached our peak in this world. It's scary.

Now I think that maybe US is stagnant because you can't develop infinitely not because sth is blocking you. You say that US should invest more into science but from what I can see many US scientists aren't productive. Money won't solve the problem because there is not enough work to do. So it's great that another countries are developing because if US or Europe doesn't need well-educated people who want to do innovative stuff, there is a place we can all go to.

 

[Rika]

Or maybe you weren't prepared or didn't realize that being in HEP involves doing mostly that!

Research in materials is similar. You babysit big cauldron for 15 years and you test samples that cauldron pops out.

Is reasearch in your field more interesting?

I feel like it's the nature of engineering and physics field to be a little mundane and repetitive.

If students who wish to go into physics in this forum get to realize that (i) physics is such a huge field (ii) different areas offers different nature of work and (iii) many areas of physics offers such a tremendous job opportunities compare to the ones that most people are familiar with, then we have done a tremendous service already.

I think you should made a guide about job opportunities in different braches of physics (not only accelerator one) and nature of work done there.

 

[ParticleGrl]

And every time I hear on here of kids who haven't seen what is the reality in many of these fields wanting to do "theory" or "particle physics", I cringe. I'm not trying to stop anyone. But as I've said earlier, you need to go into this with eyes fully wide open and not simple based on the romanticized version of what you see on TV or what you perceived it is.

Well, the good news is that if you have a romanticized notion of what HEP is, you will get that disabused after roughly a month of working towards your phd- plenty of time to find another advisor and find something else you'd rather be doing.

To me, the more pernicious problem is the lack of discussion within programs of the job opportunities outside of academics. When I talked to my advisor and to the career counselors, I was given the understanding that there are opportunities for HEP phds to keep working doing some sort of scientific research outside of academia. i.e. "There is a shortage of scientists in industry"/"Most phds go on to do research in industry."

It takes years to find out that isn't very true- you have to see multiple students graduate, and actively keep in contact to find out where they end up. By then, you are a third or fourth year grad student, and its very late to switch gears.

Personally, I loved my phd work and its been a struggle to come to the realization that I will never again be able to do the work. Its been an even bigger struggle to learn that despite a phd in physics, I'll almost certainly never find work doing any kind of scientific research. If I could do it again, I would pursue a field that I liked slightly less but had a better chance of giving me a long term scientific career or other job I want (a phd in econ or CS is much more likely to get you a professorship then one in a science,etc). If your utility is High energy physics > other scientific research > other sort of work, getting a HEP phd is the wrong move.

 

[ZapperZ]

Research in materials is similar. You babysit big cauldron for 15 years and you test samples that cauldron pops out.

Is reasearch in your field more interesting?

I feel like it's the nature of engineering and physics field to be a little mundane and repetitive.

I disagree. As someone who was trained as a condensed matter experimentalist, I was responsible for a huge potion of my research. I wasn't one of hundreds of collaborators, and I get to design and explore various systems and experimental techniques. In fact, I've even had to build parts of a system myself.

All of these skills became not only a huge reason why I could explore industries as a job alternative, but it also became valuable in my job as a physicist. It isn't mundane, not in the least bit. It only appears mundane to the uninformed.

As.

 

[chill_factor]

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."

Well, I'm still a student, so the loads of problem solving and sludging through difficult problems is what I know. Yes, it is necessary, I agree. But I don't wake up looking forward to doing it. I don't even wake up dreaming to go to the lab. You did, you enjoyed it, so you succeeded and became a professor, right? You're one of the few that made it.

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.

Yep the success was based mostly on abundant natural resources per capita, low population density and open land with a good temperate climate, most countries that have this and not too terrible political leadership are reasonably well off.

 

[chill_factor]

I disagree. As someone who was trained as a condensed matter experimentalist, I was responsible for a huge potion of my research. I was one of hundreds of collaborators, and I get to design and explore various systems and experimental techniques. In fact, I've even had to build parts of a system myself.

All of these skills became not only a huge reason why I could explore industries as a job alternative, but it also became valuable in my job as a physicist. It isn't mundane, not in the least bit. It only appears mundane to the uninformed.

As.

OK, I'm in your field. I think it depends on your specific professor. There are people who are well trained like you are with many opportunities, and there are those who really do babysit a cleanroom and an SEM/XRD...

 

[twofish-quant]

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.

This is what worries me. The US has an advantage over Japan because it has a steady stream of immigration which keeps lots of people in working age. However, if the US economy declines, then that will decrease both immigration and birth rates (i.e. fewer people move to the US, people put off having kids) which makes the problem of paying for an aging population worse. The other thing is that bad economic times makes people hostile to immigrants. If unemployment were 3%, people would be rolling out welcome mats for immigrants, but once it goes to 8%, then people would prefer that you go home.

Relating this to physics, and my astrophysics background. One thing that you look for in physics are feedback cycles, since pretty dramatic things can happen once you have positive or negative feedback. Once you've found a cycle, then you can look at time scales.

So (more unemployment -> less immigration and birth rates -> more unemployment) is something that I'm worried about.

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.

It's a symptom of an underlying problem. The fact that people are moving overseas should cause people in the US to be more worried than they are. This happened to Sweden in the early 20th century. One surprising thing is that while Sweden is thought of as an egalitarian society today, it got that way after a lot of soul search about why so many Swedes were moving to the US.

There are some funny selection effects. It's not surprising that people that move overseas to get away from the US, are more pessimistic about the US than people that stay.

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).

But what I'm telling you is that China today is more friendly to risk takers and entrepreneurs than the US, particularly if you don't have a ton of education. Take Mark Zuckerberg. Suppose he didn't go to Harvard? Suppose he was a high school dropout. What's he supposed to do? In China, he could rent out a stall on Huaqiangbei Lu and sell cell phone parts.

There are tons of business opportunities in China, both for people with education and for people without education. These attract the entrepreneurial and risk-takers. There are a lot of internet companies like QQ, Tencent, Sohu, Baidu, etc. etc.

The other thing is that there is a time lag. Facebook exists today because of massive government spending in the 1960's and 1970's.

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.

Again the more you sweat, the less you bleed. I'm worried that people aren't worried.

I think I more or less agree with you about what drives the US economy. The point that I'm making is that the longer the US takes to recover, the more likely it is that the factors that drive US economic growth will disappear. The longer the US economy stays in the doldrums, the more likely it is that it will no longer be a destination for immigration, and the more likely it is that people with entrepreneur spirit will just leave. If the US economy recovers in two years, this won't be a problem.

If it takes >5 years for there to be a recovery, then the US will no longer be an destination for either immigration or entrepreneurs, at which point you are hosed. It's not the end of the world. The US will still be a nice comfortable place to life, but the "American Dream" will no longer be in America.