The secret life of a physicist: moments of transcendence offset by months of confusion

[rug]

Having to move position so regularly means there is little stability, but there is something special about uncovering nuggets of universal truth about the cosmos

Monday 24 October 2016 03.00 EDT
Anonymous

I’d wanted to be a physicist ever since I was a kid. Of course, back then I had no real idea what exactly a physicist did. What I did know from books was that the sun was very big, but that there were many stars in our galaxy so much bigger; that all the wildly different things in our world were made from just a few varieties of inconceivably tiny atoms, but that those were made of tinier things still; that time did not just go back further than the building of the pyramids, but further than the birth of my species, my star, my galaxy. To a mildly obsessive youngster, it seemed that learning about these things would be a very fine thing indeed.

Physicists come to the field in all kinds of different ways, but some version of this wonderment is shared by all of us. It is what compels us to go through a decade of formal university education. The original research you do during your PhD prepares you, to some extent, for what’s expected in the next three to 10 years as a postdoctoral researcher at various institutions. These appointments are for a few years at a time, don’t pay a lot, and are exceedingly hard to get. You have to prove your capacity as an independent researcher, basically putting work ahead of everything else. I am a postdoc, and I’m trying to keep my eye on the prize, which only a tiny minority attain: a tenure-track position as a professor. Only once you land one of those do you have a good shot at actually doing this physics thing for the rest of your career.

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At its best, the job allows us to experience moments of sublime joy: every now and then, you feel like you are uncovering nuggets of universal, objective truth about the cosmos. These moments of transcendence are predicated by months and years of confusion, obsession, mistakes and incremental work. Even if a particular discovery or insight isn’t your own, being able to understand it and grasp its significance inspires awe. Almost all of us are atheists, but we worship at the altar of nature.

I know our work is important in its own right, but like most of us, I selfishly do what I do because I can’t imagine doing anything else. Given all of its flaws, it is incredible that society recognises the value of basic research, and lends its support. We serve at its pleasure and owe it our gratitude.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/24/secret-life-physicist-moments-transcendence

[Jim__]

1. "Good luck, physicists, with those tricky 'meaning of life' questions"

This essay was linked from the essay you linked to. An excerpt:

I had to smile. I am standing in a circle with Prof Jim Al-Khalili and others, discussing the new findings about the big bang. To be honest, my head doesn't really get itself around gravitational waves at the best of times, but before breakfast it's all too much. But then comes a moment of insight. Someone asks Al-Khalili – a professor of theoretical physics – what came before the big bang. What caused the cause of all things?

His answer is clever but unsatisfying. It's like asking what is south of the South Pole, he says. In other words, it's a mistaken question. Why the smile? Because, say, a hundred years ago, these questions would have been asked of theologians – if God created everything who created God? And, of course, we had no answer either. Or gave some similarly evasive version of the South Pole answer. But now that people don't care what religion has to say, it is physicists who are facing a very similar interrogation. My smile was … good luck, mate. Over to you. And what made the situation even more delicious was that Al-Khalili is also now president of the British Humanist Association. We are turning our physicists into theologians – even the atheist ones. What are gravitational waves, I ask my scientist friend Adam Rutherford. "Think of them as divine burping," he says.

It seems odd to argue that science is long behind the curve, and way behind theology, but when it comes to cosmology it feels very much like that to me. It's not that I think what they say is untrue. Science is better at dealing with truth questions than theology. Rather, I think that it doesn't much matter existentially. At least, I can't see how something that happened 13bn years ago helps me understand anything about what I am up to this morning. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had this one right back in the 1940s: "How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know."

Likewise, there is no answer to the meaning of life hidden behind an exploding gas of atoms. So why do the Sheldons of this world persist in aping the theologians and looking for deep meaning in so distant a place? It's not just that there is no God of the gaps – there is no ultimate meaning in the gaps either. Neither science nor theology can provide any sort of answer by looking in this non-place. But the popular imagination still assumes that there is something about cosmology that is a big deal for the human condition.

a little bit more ...

[rug]

2. Thanks for those links.

I'll now have to scour Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica for the physical Law of Meaning. Hopefully it will be happier than the Law of Gravity.