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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Physicist, working as a physicist (PhD 2015). Precision tests of gravity, primarily. We test the equivalence principle, Newton's inverse square law, hunt for exotic forms of dark matter, and build/invent cutting-edge sensors for LIGO.

I have begun looking about at jobs outside of academia in order to decide whether to stay or go. Data science is one of the easiest transitions a physicist with data-analysis can make, which I think explains the prevalence of physicists in that role. We have the training in both the techniques and a sober assessment of uncertainties, which makes us desirable.

So far, in my search for outside employment, I haven't found anything that draws me as much as my present work, but if you're in the Seattle area and looking for an experimental physicist with a broad range of experience, please get in touch.

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> We test [...] Newton's inverse square law

Imagine taking Newton down in the Replication Crisis Wars!

Newton would not be taken down by this experiment because Newton's laws have a known precision bound. If we did not include the precision bound in our holistic idea of "Newton's laws," they would already have been falsified by relativity and quantum mechanics. Every physical theory has a precision bound that is determined by the most precise experiment that has ever tested it.

Well, I think that's a problem with calling this situation "The Replication Crisis". The basic laws of physics have been verified to an extraordinary degree of accuracy on the that people deal with them daily and even at the ordinary atomic level - if anything, physics has the opposite crisis where it's theories are not fully self-consistent on every hypothetical condition but where in every condition we can produce, one or another theories works with apparently perfect precision.

"The Replication Crisis" has basically involved rather different fields - psychology and human biology/medicine most often. The crisis could be called "human and animal testing crisis" imo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Apologies for the delayed reply -- HN's noprocrast setting is a powerful taskmaster.

What we do is search for deviations from Newton's inverse square law. Depending upon the distance over which an experiment is performed, the ISL can be correct to a precision as high as ~10^-10 [1]. In particular, our group works to test whether the inverse-square law (or indeed gravity at all) happens as predicted at distances shorter than 100 microns [2]. It still amazes me that at distances shorter than half the diameter of a human hair, nobody has any idea whether gravity even happens.

Newton's early observations (and Kepler's) have been replicated many times -- there is no risk of a major replication-crisis upheaval there.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0307284 (Figure 4)

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0611184

How about the going the other way? I'm an engineer (hydrodynamics and optimization, and econometrics way back before all that.. and.. aerospace before that) who just finished a PhD and who has been writing software professionally for a large-ish engineering-software-company for 5 years while working on said degree. I have a serious-for-an-amateur physics side habit and really want to bring my work and play closer together. At work I look after a code base that is a half million lines of ancient f77/c++ so maybe that is a factor in my wanting something new!

Any room for scientific software developer at LIGO? Gravity is a beast... I will leave it at that. But I can signal process and I am not afraid to ask stupid questions. Looking for growth industries, I've had my eye on quantum computing and am just putting resumes together now. I'm really into differential geometry and topology but my understanding is amateurish and what I've learned of QFT, geometric physics, topology, etc., is uneven at best.

If you really are interested in software dev / data science I can ask around my company. They have a Seattle office* and a broad range of needs for different developer backgrounds --- at least when all offices are considered. Typically there is wiggle room to work from one office with a group based elsewhere. I can't guarantee anything though -- it's been hard to get anyone hired lately!

Back to gravity and such: I doubt you find anything, without physics in it, that draws you in as much as your present work, but it can't hurt to look around! How about a switch to focus on quantum computing if data science doesn't draw you? Bar that, what about numerical simulation?

*I'm not in Seattle.

It is much more challenging to go the other way -- there are a lot of people deeply in love with the field, with field-specific training, who would like to stay in (at significant financial and temporal sacrifice).

That said, if one wanted to move toward LIGO from a software background, the chink in the armor is that the signal-processing is hard and computationally bound. Helping signal-analysis groups to find efficiencies there would have an impact.

I continue to keep an eye on quantum-computing infrastructure hires in the Seattle area -- so far, I've proven to be too physics-focused to want to work solely on provisioning the (awesome) cryostats that house the quantum-computing devices under test. That may prove to be a sub-optimal life-decision -- time will tell :).

Fair enough. And yep, I plan to find a chink in the ol' armor somewhere. Just get me 20% time thinking physics at work and I will be happy... (even if it we never "get there" with the device) Or more likely my insatiable appetite will only increase..

I did undergrad at UW, several of my classmates did grad work on LIGO and were on the gravity wave teams when they had their first detection. Amazing what timing can do for a career. I visited Hanford LIGO in 2012 before the detection, really interesting back then to hear their frustrations and steady commitment.

I graduated and did a few strtuos, now working on autonomous self-delivering ebikes in SODO.

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