
What Does Any of This Have to Do with Physics? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-physics
======
volkk
A great read.

Something that stuck with me throughout the article was that the concept of
"you can do anything" was almost masked by the fact that he had placed all of
his "apples" into one basket--Rajeev. Of course this was a different time, and
I think it highlights just how important the internet and technology have
become in our professional success.

Had this been present day, Henderson could have tried to make use of others
through collaboration, just as Rajeev himself pointed out towards the end.
Somewhere in the article he mentioned his doubts within his teacher, and
that's something that I think most people need to realize. Teachers are just
people with their own faults. Nowhere does it state that your teacher is going
to know the answer to your success. If you continually find yourself lost and
doubtful, you should extend your reach and try to seek help from other minds
as well.

He was on a journey with thousands of forks within thousands of roads, and
simply locking yourself in a room for 15 hours a day, essentially brute
forcing different paths isn't a healthy way of going about research or
anything in life.

~~~
crispyambulance
Henderson seems a bit melancholic but he did just fine.

Should it really matter to him or anyone else that he "quit" Physics? I don't
think so. Too many people get hung up on having a continuous unbroken
progression of career advancement in one "field" whatever it is.

You CAN do anything. And that includes changing your mind, your job, and your
values. He didn't stick with Physics after getting his PHD... so what?

~~~
makeset
My thoughts exactly. Sounds like he matched up with a pretty great advisor
(good person, good manager, helpful, smart), worked on interesting problems,
made progress on some, published, and graduated. To boot, when he decided to
move on, his physics skills made him highly employable in the financial
industry. I'd call that a success story as far as grad school goes.

~~~
daxfohl
Funny thing is that when he asked Rajeev why he had failed, Rajeev had
probably been asking himself the same question for years. A lifetime dedicated
to cyclotomic fiber bundles that will probably end up in the dustbin of
history.

If your only measure of success is to do something truly transformative, well,
you've got Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, and then everyone else who has tried
and failed, so good luck. Wall Street was probably the better choice. And it
_could_ have turned into a Swiss patent office thing that formal academia
would have denied anyway.

Grass is always greener on the other side.

------
kurthr
Wow, I see how this is relevant to startups, because it's one of the best
essays about grad-school and PhD research as I've seen. The people who attempt
it are capable and driven, but a good advisor is often critical. There are a
lot of hills to climb and the most important thing to learn is how to guide
yourself when the way isn't clear! We want to change the world...

When I saw these lines I thought maybe his Advisor wasn't doing such a good
job:

 _A year or so of research with Rajeev, and I found myself frustrated and in a
fog, sinking deeper into the quicksand but not knowing why. Was it my lack of
mathematical background? My grandiose goals? Was I just not intelligent
enough? Or maybe it was the type of research Rajeev had me doing._

Then he moved on to a thesis and graduated, which shows that Rajeev was doing
his job as a Boss and Professor. Advice about using your strengths, working
with others, focusing on success and minimizing mistakes... it really does
translate to most quests.

I'm sad the writer doesn't remember being happy since he starting his PhD.
Choosing to make your dream your job is a dangerous thing, especially if you
can't still enjoy the path. He's good at writing so I hope he enjoys that now.

~~~
beambot
> minimizing mistakes

Agree with everything but that. Making lots of mistakes was the best part
about academia. Just don't hold on to them for too long (sunk cost fallacy),
don't take things too seriously (ie stake your identity on any one idea), and
treat them as the most valuable learning opportunities.

~~~
kurthr
I agree with you... science is really all about fixing mistakes. What I meant
was exactly what you say, to minimize their emotional impact, not their
rational effects.

------
smaddali
A quote from this long article.. \--- “Now you know what makes theoretical
physics so hard,” he said. “It’s not that the problems are hard, although they
are. It’s that knowing which problems to try and solve is hard. That, in fact,
is the hardest part.” \--- As with startups, all startups are hard but knowing
which one to pursue and give life is _very_ hard.

~~~
mysterydip
Same with gamedev. Ask anyone who is into it how many ideas for games they
have (heck just tell someone you make games and they'll likely tell you an
idea they had for a game they want to see made). Figuring out which one could
be a success in terms of fun, popularity, or finances, is the question. Which
is why rapid prototyping of core mechanics to "find the fun" is so critical.

------
pducks32
As a physicist, I see people all the time wondering what to do with it and
looking for a justification for all the hard work. But physics is a hobby
subject. It's rim is so vastly complicated that you can push and push at the
boundary your whole life and get no where. You have to do it because you love
it and you have to accept the abstract nonsense of it all. I also studied math
and art history so I was down to do thinks I thought were abstract awesomeness
without wondering about a job. I was lucky in that I'm a software dev so I had
a job anywhere but my point is that I really feel for people who follow what
they love and then become disillusioned. It really sucks.

~~~
21
Beside the fact that it's interesting, I think there's also a bit of prestige
involved, nobody bats an eye if physicists say "we are improving the world,
advancing man kind", as opposed to the same smart man becoming a financial
trader, where lots of people will say that you are scum living on the back of
others, or even a software developer working on something like ads.

~~~
rawnlq
The same writer also wrote about his finance career:
[http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/what-i-learned-from-
losing-...](http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/what-i-learned-from-
losing-200-million)

------
BeetleB
"Shut up and calculate" was indeed _not_ coined by Feynman. It was, in fact,
coined by David Mermin in an essay he had written once.

The amusing thing is that Mermin himself had forgotten that he had coined it
and claimed Feynman to be the source. Eventually, he looked into it and found
the earliest reference to the phrase was his own essay! (with no reference to
Feynman)

His book, Boojums All The Way is one of the most entertaining books about his
adventures as a physicist.

(For those who do not know him, he co-wrote the standard text book on Solid
State Theory).

~~~
da-bacon
Here is the essay he wrote about his realization that he coined the term:
"Could Feynman have said this?" www.gnm.cl/emenendez/uploads/Cursos/callate-y-
calcula.pdf

Also highly recommend his Boojums.

------
nappy-doo
This is possibly the best article I've ever read about grad school. If you
haven't read it yet, do. You'll like it.

~~~
JabavuAdams
It jives with what I've observed the grad students I've known going through.

I think it's important to frame oneself as a mental athlete. Olympic athletes
don't exert themselves for 20 hours and then get 4 hours sleep and expect any
kind of peak performance. You need sleep, you need a mix of focused effort,
and unfocused consolidation / inspiration time, etc.

Programmers and students have a tendency to ignore lessons about training and
peak performance that are well understood by those in physical sports.

This course changed my life: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

~~~
vecter
Irrelevant grammatical nitpick: I think the word you're looking for is "jibe",
not "jive". From M-W: [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/jibe](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jibe)

    
    
        verb: to be in accord

~~~
whorleater
Weird, I've always heard "jive" informally used as "to be in accord", and it
seems like it's commonly held slang:
[http://americanenglishdoctor.com/wordpress/jive-and-
jibe](http://americanenglishdoctor.com/wordpress/jive-and-jibe)

------
hnarayanan
This piece moved me to tears. It feels like watching my own life retold by
someone who’s so much more articulate than me.

It’s strange when the source of your intellectual self-worth is also the
source of your depression.

------
d_burfoot
> You can do whatever you want

This is very dangerous advice to give a young person. But the author should
have done a better job at interpreting the message. If your father tells you
that you can do whatever you want, do you conclude that you can get good
enough at tennis to win the US Open? No, of course not, that's absurd. But
winning the US Open is MUCH EASIER than discovering the Holy Grail of physics.
Properly understood in this context, the father's message meant "if you want,
you can become a physicist" \- and it was probably correct. The author's
downfall was that he overinterpreted the promise of the message and was also
too ambitious to accept the lesser reward of "merely" becoming an average
professional physicist.

------
anigbrowl
_What we’d created is called a “toy model”: an exact solution to an
approximate version of an actual problem. This, I learned, is what becomes of
a colossal conundrum like quantum gravity after 70-plus years of failed
attempts to solve it. All the frontal attacks and obvious ideas have been
tried. Every imaginable path has hit a dead end._

Isn't that a clue that one of the premises is fundamentally wrong? I'm no
scientist but I rely on the scientific method, and questioning my assumptions
when I'm stuck almost invariably proves more productive than refining my
hypothesis. OK, my problems are very shallow, but nature's complexity
generally seems to be the result of simple processes, elaborated and iterated.
The author's description reminds me very much of the experience of
painstakingly 'solving' one side of a Rubik's cube before realizing the more
general iterative approach.

~~~
adrianN
Some problems are just damn hard. I don't know enough Physics, but in CS there
are many examples of problems that have been open for decades were we still
don't even know where to begin with a proof. The most prominent example is P
vs NP. It's been open for forty years and all we have is a number of proof
techniques where we know that they can't work. Complexity theory in general is
a field where all the interesting problems either are solved or have been open
for a long time and researchers retreat to working on very special cases of
very special problems.

~~~
rdlecler1
Figuring out the null hypothesis (toy model) can be a big first step. For
instance, planets should move according to an ellipse, but they don't because
of the gravitational pull of other planets and moons. This deviation from the
null hypothesis can be quite informative and help with further discovery.

------
NumberSix
"Shut up and calculate" hasn't produced much in the way of concrete or
practical results compared to the heyday of fundamental physics in the first
half of the 20th century that produced quantum mechanics, special and general
relativity, the atomic bomb, etc. It has produced extremely complex
mathematical systems like string theory that seem to have led nowhere.

Quantum mechanics is probably "incomplete" as Einstein argued. Hence attempts
to unify general relativity and the current quantum theory are likely to fail,
as they appear to, since a revised quantum theory is needed.

If the data -- angular velocity distributions of start etc. -- used to support
"dark matter," "dark energy" and other patches to the prevailing theory of the
Big Bang and cosmology is in fact evidence that Newtonian gravity does not
apply at galactic scales and above, then general relativity is not correct at
galactic scales and above. Again this would make unifying the established
quantum theory and the established general relativity theory incapable of
matching observed reality.

The ubiquitous lack of secure longer term jobs like Einstein's civil service
job at the patent office -- he was not a post-doc -- make deeper conceptual
analysis of the outstanding problems in physics today difficult, probably
impossible.

~~~
marcosdumay
"Shut up and calculate" is the mentality that produced nearly all the XX
century advances on the quantum physics theories.

It's not that everybody subscribed to it - I don't think anybody ever fully
subscribed to it - but that advances insisted on only coming on those times
people were thinking this way. That's why people teach it today.

But at the relativity side, it seems that "shut up and calculate" never gave
good results.

~~~
NumberSix
Everyone calculates. In my mind, "shut up and calculate" refers to a very
strong emphasis on calculation and symbolic manipulation to the near or total
exclusion of conceptual analysis expressed in words and pictures.

In particular the "losers" at the 1927 Solvay Congress -- Schrodinger,
Einstein, and de Broglie -- seem to be the antithesis of "shut up and
calculate" and all contributed very critical elements of quantum theory.

Schrodinger found the Schrodinger equation, the differential equation that
describes so much correctly, through his approach. This is significant because
the operator methodology of Heisenberg and Gottingen either did not work,
despite the claims it is equivalent to the Schrodinger equation, or was
essentially impossible to use to make predictive calculations. Schrodinger's
publication of the Schrodinger equation provided an easy way to calculate
results in QM that proved correct using well-know differential
equations/calculus methods.

For whatever reason, perhaps to keep their research program afloat, the
"winners" at the Solvay Congress jettisoned the conceptual underpinnings of
Schrodinger's approach and married it to the operator formalism leading to
quantum field theory with its intractable infinities and other problems that
remain to this day.

~~~
marcosdumay
I'd say it is strong emphasis on models predictive power, to the exclusion of
judging if it improves our understanding of the world. The "shut up" part is
more key than the "calculate".

~~~
NumberSix
I am not sure if we disagree here or not.

Predictive power has not always trumped understanding as a goal. The original
Copernican theory did not work as well as the Ptolemaic model used by
astronomers. The Ptolemaic model as it had evolved in the 16th century was
extremely complex with many fit parameters and predicted planetary motions
relatively well.

All of the models shared the incorrect assumption of uniform circular motion
and epicycles, both the Copernican, Tyco Brahe's hybrid system, and the
traditional Ptolemaic model which by virtue of the thousands of years of
effort invested in it -- it arguably dates back to ancient Sumeria -- actually
predicted the motions of Mars and other planets best.

It was only the addition of elliptical orbits with non-uniform motion by
Kepler that resulted in the new model surpassing the Ptolemaic model.

In the case of planetary motions, understanding ultimately proved critical. We
can predict planetary motions to about 1 in 100,000 accuracy versus about 1 in
100 with the Ptolemaic model of the 16th century.

~~~
daxfohl
I think Kepler was the epitome of "shut up and calculate". Measure the motion
of the planets, come up with detailed formulas describing them. Newton
transcended that by identifying simple relations and invariants that unfolded
to exactly those equations. I'd argue Newton and Einstein are the only two who
have transcended "shut up and calculate". In the latter case we otherwise
would have patched in Lorentz transforms and stated "just because" like
Kepler. In quantum mechanics, I feel like it's still something on a Kepler
level, equations "just because", waiting for a more fundamental understanding.

~~~
NumberSix
I would say certainly not. In Nova Astronomia in which Kepler lays out his
discovery, one finds chapters and chapters (originally in Latin) of verbal
analysis of what is going on. He did not just find a formula that worked
blindly. Rather he envisioned an influence -- either magnetism or something
similar to magnetism -- which he calls specie (a Latin term used in magic and
mysticism) extending out from the Sun guiding the motions of the planets. This
was a clear precursor to the concept of a gravitational field.

------
placebo
Very good read, and resonated with me because I had read the same new agey
books at the time, went to study physics with the same "I'll find the grail"
philosophy and had felt the painful blow of disillusionment, together with
other blows that convinced me to leave the path much earlier than the author
of the article.

Many years later, I feel that "the grail" is still the driving force behind
most of my thoughts, but frankly, I doubt it is reachable by thought. Suppose
someone will solve quantum gravity. I'd be very excited and curious - it would
be wonderful and fascinating, but I believe any claim that "Physics is solved"
that might be stated after that would be as misguided as lord Kelvin's claim
at the time. Any solution would eventually just set the stage for the next
grail chase, with more food for the mind to chew on from an infinite supply
and no answer will really make a dent in the armour surrounding the question
of what is the essence of this food supply or it's relation to the thoughts
that contemplate it. I can't prove any of this of course...

~~~
dmfdmf
<... _but I believe any claim that "Physics is solved" that might be stated
after that would be as misguided as lord Kelvin's claim at the time._>

Perhaps and maybe even for a long time but you can't have an infinite
progressions of "fundamental" theories at some point the questions will be
answered such that "this" is as far as we can go. The problems and questions
in physics are philosophical (more specifically epistemology) and revolve
around what is a valid measurement when you get down to the limit of
measurement?, what is an observer and what distinguishes the observer from the
observed? Unfortunately, the vast majority of physicists disdainfully reject
philosophy as bunk and continue to mathturbate even as their own theories
become indistinguishable from bunk.

------
j7ake
One thing I got from this article is that the art of doing science takes years
to develop. Developing a taste for what is good research and a direction for
what is a good path only comes from an apprenticeship model where you copy and
learn from your mentor. It really shows how important taste, guidance, and
perseverance is in order to avoid getting lost or distracted.

Wonderful article.

------
potbelly83
Great essay, really hits the nail on the head about how hard it is to do
fundamental research. I especially liked the comment about controlling your
emotions.

~~~
JabavuAdams
A former boss of mine (head of a 20-person or so game studio) told me this
once, but I didn't appreciate it at the time.

I've been living this for the last couple of years, though. So true.

------
Nomentatus
I went in to University (not physics) with the same stars, but I'd read far
more history of science. I knew that almost everyone who tries to make
something more than an incremental discovery fails miserably, I just thought
it was very honorable to make the attempt, if you thought you might have what
it takes.

I left because, when I looked around after many years, it was very clear that
(where I was) absolutely none of the professors around me had any intention of
solving the problems they were paid to discuss, nor any interest in doing so.
They were quite capable of becoming angry at any sign that others did. So even
if I did want to solve the problems (which I still did) hanging around them
would be more hindrance than help. They wanted the prestige, they wanted to
cash the people's checks - just so long as they didn't have to do the job,
because it might pose some small risk that reputation, and affect the size of
their wine cellar.

Rajeev's eventual answer had to more to do with reputation than big problem-
solving, he may have been a functionary when push comes to shove, as well.

------
hkon
Wow, I rarely read pieces like this all the way through. But this was simply
too good to just scroll through. (Realized this after scrolling halfway
through).

So, scrollers beware.

------
BrandoElFollito
This is an interesting read, a perspective on expectations vs reality and
possibly upbringing.

I always loved science as a kid. I studied physics because it is fun. I did
not think about the future then. I went for a PhD somewhere between theory,
experiment and computer simulation because it was fun. I did not think about
the future then either.

I knew that I was average+ in Physics and knew that I would never get a Nobel
Prize but the pleasure of doing Physics was important to me. Then I quit,
right after my PhD to pursue other fun things in IT. I am still there because
it is fun. I still do not think about the future and the fact that I will be
the next Gates or Zuckerberg.

I strongly believe that one should be driven by the CAPACITY to make CHOICES
and that this is what makes someone happy. This is also what I tell my ~11 yo
children. It is not "you can do what you want" but "I will torture you into
getting the right marks and schools to enable you to make a choice when you
choose your university. You can be an artist, a physicist, a doctor, an
accountant or a baker. The important part is that you will be armored to be
able to use the word CAN. So get back to homework."

------
WhitneyLand
Would recommend reading for everyone. There's so much more here than getting a
phd in physics.

There a few different life lessons here to learn from or to think about.

------
daxfohl
It seems like academia needs a "20% time" thing like Google. You can get a
grant for doing cyclotomic fiber bundles in a single dimension, because it's
mathy and publishable and not too far from the mainstream, even if the
likelihood of this being The Grail (or real in any way) is low.

You can't get funding to look at something completely off the cuff. Even 100
years ago Einstein couldn't have gotten funding to investigate some idea that
distorts distance and time. I think 20% time to investigate whatever crazy
idea you want would be beneficial to making more substantial progress in the
real fundamental problems.

------
justinpombrio
Grad school is tough.

~~~
celias
[http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~w301497/teaching/images_teaching/l...](http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~w301497/teaching/images_teaching/life_in_hell-
graduate_school.gif)

------
pas
tl;dr: success (in many walks of like, as in science, especially in abstract
branches like theoretical physics and mathematics) is simply not quitting, and
has almost nothing to do with winning big (Nobel, Fields, Abel). And those who
stay long enough gain tenure.

It's not glamorous, it's shitty. Long hours, low pay. But you do science. And
no one ever can take that away from you, which is nice.

~~~
jessriedel
I do not this is a message conveyed by the author, much less a summary of the
article.

------
jjangsangy
This story resonated with me deeply, I enjoyed every word.

