Mr.Moai wrote: ↑Mon Sep 18, 2023 7:21 pm
Don't you find fulfilment in pursuit of secrets of the universe anymore? Not because it would lead to money, awards, recognition, or fame, but for the fun of it with a side effect of also contributing to furthering our species like the scientific giants before you?
Is it because you think that our civilisation took a wrong turn where humanity would have been better off taking a different direction in the past several millennia that you are not interested in participating in it this way?
Or is it because pursuing the type of research you enjoy is incompatible with the level of bureaucracy, hassle, and loss of autonomy that you are willing to tolerate? Or is it a lack of access to specialist labs/kit/machinery?
d) All of the above.
Actual research is a lot less romantic or heroic than typically portrayed by science popularizations. Read this insider view:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310368.pdf
For a theorist, "doing science" means writing and debugging complicated numerical programs (at 1/3 the pay of a software engineer) for months on end in order to uncover some detail about the universe that only five other people in the world care about($). Then write it up, publish it, and go to a few conferences trying to sell its importance to others. "Selling" is nearly as important as originality. Science has its own trends and fashions. Rinse and repeat that publication cycle four times per year all while begging for grant money because your research is "very interesting" and "state-of-the-art".
($) A lot of my work was about nucleosynthesis and the origin of the elements. This is the stuff that popularists like Neil deGrasse Tyson translates into slogans like "we're all made out of star dust" that unitive hippies go nuts about how "it's all connected, woooaaa!". Whereas, the day-to-day labor of inverting huge semi-sparse matrices in an expedient (remember the 3 month deadline) manner and plotting a bunch of graphs that experimental physicists can cite to justify how their work is "very-important" in their own grant requests. A typical published result would be along the lines of "The importance of the 2.32MeV resonance line in the SomeIsotope(somereaction)SomeOtherIsotope reaction for the abundance of SomeThirdIsotope". (Mind you, that's but one out of 3000+ isotopes known) This quickly dissolves any kind of romance. Star-stuff, indeed.
Insofar this research advances humanity, the advance is infinitesimally incremental indeed(*). The bigger role of research, something that I realized as a grad student, is the role universities play in a) educating students who go on to have what academics refer to as "real jobs"; and b) maintaining a readiness as a cultural carrier, because all those papers and libraries are worth zilch without a scientific culture that is able to understand them. In that way, it's kinda like how the military keeps training to maintain a state of readiness even when it's not at war. The ability to operate a submarine or simulate a supernova explosion is not something anyone can pick up in a few weeks of deep-diving into manuals.
(*) The era of "giants" is over. The hard sciences are completely institutionalized. This is partly because science now operates at a level of complexity and details that is far beyond what one person can develop. The work of a given past giant is typically only a small part of a modern project. Most notably, successful professors are not so much great researchers as they are great project managers. They don't do science as much as manage it.
I quit science to focus on ERE because I thought (and think) that ERE will have a much bigger impact on the 21st century than anything I could have done in astrophysics. These days I get to see former colleagues appearing on documentaries because they took a picture of a black hole "for the first time evaaah". Well, that's nice, but what is that useful for? In reality, there wasn't a picture as much as a group of grad students running data analysis for months on end to create a composite image. What's mainly exciting here is that they solved a hard [imaging] problem. Perhaps the methods developed will amount to something useful elsewhere, like cancer imaging or spy satellites.
I would not say that my physics education is "wasted" in any way. Rather, I think it was put to good or better use with ERE. Without my research background, my contribution would have looked a lot more like WL4-5 style FIRE. I actually think that the best creative use of any "degree" is to apply what you know in some other field rather than just being a cog in whatever machine you were trained to serve. Indeed, I think the best reason for getting a[nother] degree is to add a new perspective---really a set of sensemaking-tools---to the world.