Theoretical physics/Quant on side

[LBloom]

Hi guys,

So I'm an undergrad, planning on going to graduate school in (probably) some form of theoretical physics (particle or cmt, not sure yet). Recently I watched a video of an interview of James Simon and CN Yang (its an interesting video, I recommend it) and at one point James Simon mentioned that before he started his finance company he worked for the government as a code cracker (NSA I believe) where he worked half the time on the code cracking and the other half on his own math research.

My question is, is there any set up like that today that you guys know of i.e. a job where you do some work for a company or agency like code cracking or quantitative finance and you are also given time to do your own research?

Thanks!

 

[twofish-quant]

My question is, is there any set up like that today that you guys know of i.e. a job where you do some work for a company or agency like code cracking or quantitative finance and you are also given time to do your own research?

I haven't been able to do it. The problem is that physics research is a full time job, and I don't have the time and energy to pull two full time jobs and then raise a family.

Right now what I'm trying to do is to keep myself in touch with the research so that when I retire (and I may be able to retire very early), I'll be able to move back to full time research.

One curious thing is that you'd think that you'd be able to find a job that is half-time with half-salary, but those don't really exist.