Comment by reactordev
9 days ago
The big bang time relativity problem sometimes makes your brain hurt but this is amazing!
I’m so fascinated by the fact that we can look back through time by looking at these distant objects. I wish I went into astrophysics instead of engineering…
I went into astrophysics and came out very discouraged. The researchers actually pushing the envelope are 1% of academia and if you don't find a department with them, you are paddling in the open sea. There is an incredible amount of cruft in academia, not to mention how financially insecure that life is.
Truly, only those who think about nothing but (astro)physics can bear it.
I still love thinking about fundamental problems and upcoming research however. That will never be gone.
I realize my choice was definitely financially driven but in a future where that’s easier with AI, I’d like to focus on things that make my brain tingle.
I used to love engineering but with AI I feel like all the passion (learning things, making brain squeeze) is gone and I’m just managing another resource.
Don’t get me wrong, I like building things. I also like solving challenges and hard problems and I haven’t done that in a few years now.
You're probably suited to engineering more than physics IMO.
Physics tends to reward finding THE solution. It's akin to a pirate's quest to finding the treasure hoard. The solution rarely involves a logical progression and more luck than anything else. I recognize this is a controversial take since few people realize this and would accept it. Physics education trains people that everything is derivable through assumptions and steps but new advances rarely come through this process.
Anyways, I relate to your mindset more as well. I much rather approach solvable problems.
The nature of the basic research beast. There are grad student written astrophysics/comp chemistry spaghetti codes that continue to get big funding for the sole reason (it feels like) that they scale huge and eat up DOE supercomputing time "look how fast (we burn money)". Maybe a hot take.
what do the other 99% of researchers do?
They (professors) either focus as much as they can on teaching, mentoring (while treading their tenure status as carefully as they can). Others publishing papers do safe but small improvements in their field, in my experience, they tend to be more observational-data driven, working on surveys. It's not useless by any degree, but... they could be doing a lot more.
99% is definitely an exaggeration, I apologize. The good astrophysics researchers, imo, are focusing on improving college-level physics education, pushing breaking-edge experimental results, making sense of large-scale survey results, and working on the next big simulation run. Younger departments with younger professors tend be pushing the envelope more, we might see a industry cleanup in my lifetime.
Most research is boring incremental stuff, and very often you will find a dejected or disappointed individual that realizes this. The invention of relativity only made one scientist a household name. I guess everyone else that came before and after were doing nothing at all.
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Everyone I know who studied astrophysics ended up in Fintech doing data science anyway. "illusion of choice"
Well there is Brian May, guitarist from Queen, who finished his astrophysics PhD in 2007 but he is probably an outlier!
Yup. 2/3rds of my Physics class went straight into banking.
I remember secretly judging them at the time, but as the years wore on I came to realise how wise/scared they actually were..
I met a few in MarTech as well…