@ACuriousMind another candidate for VR

@0celoñe7 just to clarify, is $H=p^2+x^4$ self-adjoint?

hello

Sigh...I think I might give up on being a physicist

why?

@heather I keep hearing about the pressure to publish nonstop. The instability of being a new professor. The financial struggles I might encounter. Most of all how insanely difficult it is to get a job, even if you get your PhD from a top university and have a ton of research under your belt.

It's like a ton of hellish conditions were added onto beautiful profession

this might be a dumb question, but what about non-professorial positions? like lab/theory work, in academic or industry labs?

@heather Even rarer, apparently.

oh.

Or teaching positions.

Theory work is ridiculously scarce

that's discouraging for what I want to do =/

i guess quantum computing is a growing field, so i might be all right.

Cosmology is endearing and all, but this seems just impossible. And it's only gotten worse in recent decades

Or positions where you use a physicist's data analytics skills, but for interesting problems that aren't "physics."

@rob That doesn't really line up with why I'm interested in physics (i.e. understanding the universe)

@SirCumference Does teaching?

@rob At a research university, mostly yes

I'd be an expert in my field and contribute to science

is there a field that holds a little cosmology that you'd be interested in? like GR or something?

(and has better prospects?)

@heather quantum computing is hardly theoretical.

@heather I don't know what use GR could have except for in research

@SirCumference That is the case with academia generally, not just physics.

@0celoñe7 well, yes.

@DawoodibnKareem Yeah, though I'd only ever consider being a professor if it were as a physicist

@SirCumference I'm sure NASA use GR for stuff.

It's a shame I may never know GR or QFT as well as I wish I could

@SirCumference So, academic physicists are particularly bad at describing opportunities outside of academic physics. Doesn't mean the opportunities don't exist.

@SirCumference I'm not sure I understand your problem. "It's going to be difficult to get where I want to be, so I don't want to try anymore"?

^^ plus this.

@ACuriousMind Difficult doesn't seem to summarize it. One of the biggest factors is apparently luck

@DawoodibnKareem One of the most selective jobs in the field

Yeah, but somebody has to do it. Why can't that somebody be you?

Yeah, one of the biggest factors in life seems to be luck. If you have bad luck, a car's gonna hit you and there's little you can do about it :P But in this case, you can at least influence the chances, and it's not as if someone with a physics degree is unemployable.

There are many more people who think it would be neat to spend a career doing cosmology than there is funding for full-time professional cosmologists. This is a feature, not a bug: it means that the professional cosmologists on average are advancing the field more.

@EmilioPisanty My main point is that "the operator $A$ is self-adjoint" doesn't make sense. One has to specify the domain of $A$. I can say for sure that $H=p^2+x^4$ with domain $C^\infty_c(\Bbb R)$ is (i) closable (ii) its closure is self-adjoint on the closure domain (which is not the closure of the domain!).

@DawoodibnKareem I'd be banking on a risky career that would take an insane amount of work and luck to reach

@ACuriousMind To remotely get there, I feel like I'd find myself in debt I could never pay off

> it's not as if someone with a physics degree is unemployable

And don't let your current interest in cosmology limit you from other fields in physics. It took me until way too deep in my PhD to realize that many of the solid-state folks are studying phenomena that are just as interesting as the stuff that I do in nuclear physics.

@SirCumference Ah, well. The risks of that part of the American system are indeed not something I can talk about, but my impression is that you're gonna be in debt no matter what you study, no?

@heather A little too close to unemployable. Apparently in the 70s it got ridiculously more competitive. Meaning it isn't the same as it was back in the days of many college professors teaching now.

For a good overview of that, read Bob Laughlin's "A Different Universe." Great book.

@heather: Eclipse plans?

@rob Kansas City

fits in right before school starts

we'll get to see the full thing.

@heather Good answer. How much totality?

@SirCumference I didn't mean in academia. Plenty of physics people becoming software developers, data scientists, hedge fund managers/qants...plenty of companies seem happy to employ someone with a physics or a math degree for their analytical skills even where more specialized degrees exist

@rob good question, lemme look it up

@ACuriousMind As far as I know, academia is generally the go-to for researchers

Oh, sure, you're not gonna do research in most of these jobs

@Semiclassical The problem is that the physicist definition of self-adjoint is not really helpful for legitimately proving things. Here is the correct one. Let $H$ be a Hilbert space and let $A:H\to H$ be a linear operator with domain $D(A)\subset H$ dense. If for $y\in H$ the functional $\langle y,A\cdot\rangle :D(A)\to\Bbb R$ is continuous, then we say $y\in D(A^*)$. A theorem of Riesz says there is a unique $y'\in H$ such that $\langle y.A\cdot\rangle =\langle y',\cdot\rangle$.

@ACuriousMind Working for google earth isn't the same as being an "astronomer" who answers questions like, "why do things happen the way they do in space"

@Semiclassical We then define $A^*y$ by $y'$.

depending on how far outside of KC, up to 2 min 40 secs @rob

already got the glasses =D

@heather What kind of answer is that? I guess if you're not local maybe you don't know exactly where you'll be.

^

i live in a different state =P

@Semiclassical Now this defines a linear operator on $H$, $A^*$ with domain $D(A^*)$. We say that $A$ is self-adjoint if $D(A)=D(A^*)$ and $A=A^*$ on $D(A)$.

@heather Lodging arranged, or are you risking a day trip?

@rob not sure. i think we might be staying overnight.

the glasses also double as a nice way to limit the output of a laser to a single photon, i was doing some calculations.

@ACuriousMind Well, if I focus on theory, I have no backup. Even if it's practical, by the time I get a PhD I would be less employable for those non-academic jobs than people who got their Engineering MS

@heather Many millions of people believe they are also taking a day trip. Traffic will be weird. There will be sad people watching partial eclipses from highways.

Theory itself isn't very interesting to employers

@rob where will you be?

@SirCumference can you double major (again, probably stupid question)?

This just doesn't seem feasible and wouldn't produce the money to support a family, what with the debts

or major/minor?

@SirCumference I have a family member who left theoretical physics and has spent ten years as an actuary for State Farm. When I was having trouble finding a job, he said "Any time you're ready to switch, someone here will be able to make a space for you."

@heather Tried double majoring once. Hard as hell. I might reconsider it but I don't want to have worse grades than if I focus on one field

@SirCumference Okay, maybe America is very different, but in Europe, you generally don't have issues finding a job with a STEM degree, and the money you'd make outside academia is always more than what you make as a researcher.

@SirCumference is a major/minor any easier?

@heather My house is just outside totality, but my office at the university gets a minute five. The school is treating it with the seriousness of a football game, planning on 5k-20k visitors.

@ACuriousMind All STEM people are employed in Europe?

@rob wow, cool!

@ACuriousMind I envy you...the money outside of academia is higher here too, but you're considerably less employable than engineers or computer scientists

@heather The big lottery winners there are at Southern Illinois, which is well-placed for both this eclipse and the one in 2024.

@heather Firstly, I'd have to find something I have a passion for, besides science. For the last 2 years, nothing's turned up.

@heather nytimes.com/2017/06/30/science/…

Our plans are a little more modest.

@Semiclassical I gave in to abuse of notation above. I want to write $A:D(A)\to H$.

@0celoñe7 Do you always have to strawman what I say? :P Of course not. Some don't want the jobs they could get, some are otherwise unsuitable for the jobs their degree would technically qualify them for, etc, etc

@ACuriousMind I wasn't aware I ever strawman what you say.

But I don't know a single person who finished their master's degree in physics or math and was like "I can't find a job" (as opposed to "I can't find a job I really like")

But what you said is not news then -- finding a job is not an issue.

Flipping burgers is a job, sure.

@SirCumference I didn't finish what I started to say above. Not only do the condensed-matter folks look at physics that's just as interesting and fundamental as the things I work on, but the ones who get bored or broke and want careers go into the semiconductor industry and make microchips. There's money there.

@SirCumference hmm - what about, say, optics? (astrophysics -> observations -> telescopes -> optics in the telescopes) (i'm sorry, you can tell me to shut up if i'm being annoying)

@rob They're the lucky ones

@heather Optics are woefully boring.

I just feel like their isn't enough pay in any of those fields to make up for the money I'd spend on a PhD

@SirCumference Dude ... you get funded for a PhD. They pay you.

@0celoñe7 ::shrugs:: i think it's kind of cool, especially nonlinear optics.

@SirCumference I thought you were all confident about getting into a grad school?

Not much, but it's a net positive.

not as cool as quantum computing, though.

If you're paying for grad school you're deeeeeeeesperate.

Or doing liberal arts

@rob Sure, but I'll have college debts

@0celoñe7 Or outside the sciences.

@rob See my followup

@SirCumference Which are deferrable until you finish graduate school, and which you'll have no matter what your undergraduate degree choice.

@0celoñe7 It won't matter. Even a top school PhD isn't enough, luck is necessary.

@SirCumference Wait - aren't you already in college? If you're worried about college debt this is seems the wrong point in time to worry about that.

@0celoñe7 And I said I felt "a little confident"; as in, believing hard work would get me there

Now it just seems pointless

@rob Is it wise to defer? Interest accumulates, doesn't it?

^

@SirCumference why pointless? at the very least, you'll have been happy studying what you enjoy and gotten a good education, that will likely make employers happy to take you. what if you studied, for example, simulating systems in astrophysics, and then you'd have some programming experience to fall back on. it's not hopeless, as far as i can tell. maybe a little harder than you thought.

then again, i'm a teenager, so i know nothing about this

@ACuriousMind This career path just doesn't seem realistic from this perspective...I love physics and would be happy as hell to have a very deep understanding of GR and QM, but the field seems intentionally, unnecessarily difficult, luck based, stressful and low-paying

I can't imagine the effect it'd have on my life

@0celoñe7 If you have the money, and can't save it where it earns more than the interest on the loan, then it makes sense to pay it off. But if you are hoping to double your first-job salary by starting with a PhD rather than a BS, and don't have money during the PhD program, that's what deferment is for.

plenty of people survive it

And I'm saying "low-paying" in the context of having debts and struggling to get jobs, not to the people in here who are professors

Not sure anyone here is a full professor

@0celoñe7 Yeah, changed it

@SirCumference Ah, now we're getting closer. Sure, deciding you don't want to expose yourself to the stress and uncertainty is a valid decision. Before it sounded to me that you were going to abandon what you want to be because it wasn't guaranteed that you'd get there.

Well, not sure what to do now with my life

Vacation for a few weeks

@ACuriousMind Both, actually. It seems like every imaginable obstacle was stacked onto the field.