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Comment by d_burfoot | Hacker News Reader

Tip for smart science-y young people: think about a career in experimental physics. Experimental data is the complement of theoretical power. Since theory can be provided cheaply by LLMs, experimental ability is now the bottleneck for progress in physics.

I expect to see frontier labs or startups hiring experimentalists to provide data for LLMs to analyze, pushing towards breakthroughs in areas like room-temperature superconductors and fusion.

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Politely, absolutely not.

Physics as a domain is a nightmare. Even the employment statistics are hard to understand because, like Philosophy, only the best of the best pursue it.

I've had countless friends throughout my PhD studies tell me that their decision to pursue a PhD in Physics ruined their lives. (Which is an exageration, but you get the point.)

The bottom line is that you should pusue Physics only if you still want to in the face of excessive media/reccomendations/statistics telling you not to.

At least in europe you can do a 3 year Eng Phys BSc and if it doesn't pan out you can do a master in EE or MEng.

The engineering programs and their curriculums are very different from physics in the science faculties (which I guess was the context here)

i would make a similar argument for entrepreneurship and most things: do it only if you can’t bear the thought and reality of doing something else.

Pick any field and you'll find countless PhDs eager to tell anyone who will listen all the ways it ruined their lives.

Exactly. These fields demand all you've got. Otherwise, you'll fall behind those who are willing to sacrifice everything else for the quest, so to speak. There will always be a long-tailed distribution populated largely by smart people with personal regrets.

Experimental physics is worrisome because as education becomes less-valued by society, there will be less funding available for research in general. Costly and elaborate 'big science' projects -- the kind that have to span multiple Presidential administrations in the US -- will be among the first to be classified as "waste," and performatively killed by legislators who earn votes by emulating the feeble-minded cultists who elected them.

I think the way forward, at least in the US, is going to involve leveraging AI to build better models to reduce our dependence on experiment. This will be true of both biology (where's the next HeLa line going to come from, once Christian nationalists complete their takeover of NIH?) and physics (ditto the next RHIC or SLAC.)

Yes, this policy amounts to eating the next generation's seed corn, but that's what Americans are voting for.

As someone with a BS in physics, my advice to anyone who wants to study applied physics is to do robotics. Plenty of applied physics work to go around.

Experimental physics isn't just the high energy particle stuff even though that tends to get more media attention. There's a lot of condensed matter, solid state, etc stuff where you can do cutting edge research on a table top or close to it.

My university had a great Physics department (Nobel laureate level), but every year you’d have a bunch of junior year (year 3) physics students desperately trying to switch into engineering as they realized that making a go of a pure physics degree was going to be more difficult. It was a consistently repeating pattern.

That's funny because so many of us in my PhD philosophy program would say: I should've been a physicist, philosophy ruined my life. I had a physics prof who told me it was foolish to go into philosophy when I could've been a physicist and I thought I knew better. Oh well, I probably would've been a software engineer in the end no matter what.

Counterpoint: my entire physics phd cohort is doing great now and it didn’t ruin our lives.

I think better advice is “do you want to work in this specific lab for 5 years?”, not “do you really want to do physics”? Talk to the lab members, learn what they do.

I know multiple Physics PhDs who are living rich, happy lives.

Though, mostly by abandoning the field and moving to Anthropic.

If (it will) it continues like this and the line is step, as soon as math is solved good enough, the next frontier will be solved.

In regards of experimental physics, i would even argue this is being worked on for sure. The ML machines are now big enough that simulations are getting better and better fast.

Until we got robots doing that

Only theory that is a convex combination of existing theory. Any paradigm shift is currently unreachable to LLMs and can be only obtained by luck with RL due to the curse of dimensionality.

Frankly, such paradigm shifts are almost impossible for humans as well. If a mathematician proposes a truly radical paradigm shift, they're either a once-in-a-decade genius or a crackpot.

It is quite typical that once in a decade genius is treated like a crackpot... (what was the name of the Austrian doctor that suggested washing you hands before surgery?)

... of course, the number of crackpots is overwhelming

The term “currently” is the sticking point here. As far as I know, there is still no one who can provide evidence as to why it should remain that way. And the "by luck with RL" is soon not by luck anymore. The more stupid and not so stupid ideas are discussed with the LLMs, the chances are growing that it is not a question about luck but by growing probability.

This sounds depressing. Imagine going to work every day and your boss is a computer telling you to do rote nonsense so it can barely-better-than-brute-force search for breakthroughs in whatever field. Then when it finds one we get another breathless news cycle like this while you get no credit at all. If you could understand what you were working on, you might be able to contribute more than a .csv of data, but the computer can't read you in because there is no understanding under the surface.

Barely better than brute force (I can't believe it's not brute force!™) aside, presuming we get super intelligence it will all be depressing when it comes to intellectual pursuits like this.

Even the smartest humans would end up as perpetual students but I'm not sure why that should be universally depressing.

Yeah I don't understand how people can not look forward to that outcome. Imagine you have your own super von Neumann who's willing to talk to you 1:1 for as long as you'd like at any time with not a hint of judgement at your intellectual inferiority. He's been working tirelessly to figure out how everything pieces together, and has 20 layers of abstraction to draw from to lead you toward understanding what's really going on along with a concrete understanding of every field to reify his thoughts into examples familiar to you and illustrate his connections.

A nerd's dream. Maybe he'll even be able to answer about turbulence.

How’s this different from just asking an llm to prompt you to perform experiments? You don’t need any expertise.

Not a physics guy but isn’t experimental always the bottleneck?

ITT: people who think there’s going to be jobs.

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