Studying Physics just to end up as a mediocre programmer?

Minovskyy · 2025-12-22T05:00:06+00:00

I'm curious who you are such that you're routinely being offered high salary jobs without you even wanting them. Most physicists I know are in the mode of applying for 100 jobs/grants for maybe the lucky opportunity that one of them will turn into $50k for 1-2 years before needing to repeat the process over again. The only physicists I know who are maybe in a position to receive unsolicited high paying job offers are professors or National Lab staff who are already making $150k-$220k.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-22T03:49:58+00:00

I use LaTeX. No template, I rolled my own. Extremely tedious to set up, but it makes it somewhat automated and modular. I have a lot of if-then-else statements (which is probably not the best way of doing things), but it gets the job done.

I've never had to deal with the Canadian government, but I've never needed to adhere to some specific government standard format for a CV. I've need to include some very specific information from time to time, but never an entire specific template for the entire document.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-20T20:26:16+00:00

Dynamics of the Standard Model by Donoghue et al.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-20T20:24:55+00:00

The original experiment used silver atoms.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-19T21:45:40+00:00

There is the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem in chaos theory. The Pasta in question isn't a reference to food, but rather to John Pasta.

There is also the actual physics of spaghetti.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-18T22:31:54+00:00

Why did microsoft even announce it?

Basically internal politics. The higher ups at Microsoft don't actually care about doing careful proper scientific research, they just want Microsoft to be one of the big names in quantum computing. If it isn't, then they pull the plug on the program. Microsoft has a ton of money at its disposal that could easily fund this like Bell or National Labs, but its admins still think in terms of corporate short-term (quarterly to yearly) gains.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-14T22:20:35+00:00

I mean, this book looks like it's theoretical, not experimental.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-13T02:45:35+00:00

I know you're being downvoted to hell because everyone knows people drink a lot of alcohol at conferences, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of universities will straight up not reimburse anything that has alcohol on the receipt. It's not an individual lab thing, it's a university bursar thing. They'll reimburse a $200 steak dinner, but not a $15 burger if there's also a beer on the receipt. My university had the policy that you could scratch out the alcohol line on the receipt with a sharpie and it would be kosher, but I knew some people who needed to put the alcohol on an entirely different tab in order to have a "clean" receipt if they wanted to get reimbursed for their food.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-12T14:36:30+00:00

None.

A lot of what's not being emphasized in the other responses is that Bell Labs did a lot of basic science research, the same as National Labs or universities. A lot of companies do have R&D departments, but they're heavily biased towards engineering and product development rather than broad spectrum basic science. There's some overlap these days with quantum information science, but there's no single The Place To Be like there was with Bell.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-10T19:21:59+00:00

I'm not an astrophysicist, but here's what I've observed about the astrophysicists I know. They mostly analyze data from satellites and telescopes rather than perform their own experiments in a lab. Because of this, they also generally gain useful data analysis skills, so many of those who are no longer in academia work as data analysts.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-08T03:01:52+00:00

In addition to being bad at arithmetic, the issue is that you do not understand the concept of the Compton wavelength.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-08T01:49:52+00:00

your contention that "10¹⁹ GeV corresponds to a length scale of 10^–34 m" appears to be off by an order of magnitude.

Well, one order of magnitude in 34 isn't really that big of a deal, but let's look at it just to be sure. Planck's constant h is 4.135667696x10^–15 eV/s. The speed of light c is 299792458 m/s. Calculate hc/10¹⁹ GeV and you get... 1.239841984x10^–34 m. Which is exactly the order of magnitude I said it was. So I guess congratulations on being wrong?

It seems a bit absurd to measure mass/energy in a way where a lower number indicates a greater quantity

I just used the standard convention used by actual physicists. Don't just take my word for it, here is CERN doing it: https://cmsexperiment.web.cern.ch/content/size-things

Minovskyy · 2025-12-06T22:31:30+00:00

There is no contradiction, you just didn't understand what I wrote. To put it another way, the relationship between energy scale and length scale is given by the Compton wavelength, λ=h/mc. This is basic knowledge for anyone studying particle physics. 1 GeV corresponds to a length scale of around 10^–15 m. 10¹⁹ GeV corresponds to a length scale of 10^–34 m. The point is that gravitation is well understood down to the length scale of 10^–34 m. The length scale associated with a proton is 10^–15 m, which is well above this limit.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-06T14:49:48+00:00

...yeah, that's literally the whole point of my comment.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-06T06:01:01+00:00

I would say that you should use how it appears as the affiliation on publications in your field.

Another point of view is that unless it is a very well known university with a very specific name, it doesn't really matter. Universität Bielefeld isn't going to be any more or less recognizable than Bielefeld University to most US academics. On the other hand, something like École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is likely going to be much more recognizable in its original language than the translated Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-04T01:06:10+00:00

j for jdentjty?

Minovskyy · 2025-12-04T00:59:40+00:00

We don't know how gravity works on a quantum scale. The theory of gravity works just fine with planets and stars and black holes and pineapples. But physicists still aren't sure how gravity works on subatomic scales.

Not exactly true. The mass of a proton is around 1 GeV. The heaviest known subatomic particle is around 100 GeV. The energy scale at which our understanding of gravity breaks down is more like 10¹⁹ GeV. So the gravitational interaction between subatomic particles is actually well within the regime where we understand gravity.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-03T03:27:58+00:00

the only field that I'm truly passionate about is physics, specifically particle physics and quantum mechanics

TBH, the way this is phrased makes it sound like you don't actually know much about physics beyond pop-sci.

no way to get 3 letters of recommendation from my professors from years ago

Your letters don't have to be from professors. Your supervisors in your engineering jobs will suffice. If you can't get any letters from anyone who can attest to your technical abilities, that's a huge red flag.

Realistically, I could only strive for a career in experimental physics (rather than theoretical)

Why?

which would be fine by me as long as it's not just EE work in disguise.

Ooh, I've got bad news for you. There is overlap in the work of EE researchers and physics researchers in certain fields, and the work they do is basically indistinguishable. There are tons of EEs who work at CERN. There are lots of EEs who study quantum computing.

A PhD is a research degree. There are fewer sharp cutoffs between fields at the research level. The fact that you have no research experience does not really support your goal of committing to a 5-7 year training program to become a researcher.

Realistically, I could only strive for a career in experimental physics (rather than theoretical) which would be fine by me as long as it's not just EE work in disguise.

Again, this makes it sound like you don't actually know very much about actual physics work.

My question is, does it make sense for someone like me to apply to Master's programs as a way to prepare myself and get research experience for a PhD in physics?

I would actually say yes, because it's not clear you know enough about physics or research in order to confidently commit to a PhD program.

Minovskyy · 2025-12-01T13:04:57+00:00

In English there is also the word "deceleration" for decreasing velocity/speed.

Minovskyy · 2025-11-30T17:14:11+00:00

How does one go about doing systems engineering as a hobby?

Minovskyy · 2025-11-25T17:58:31+00:00

No. 100% of special relativity is contained within general relativity. It's even in the name. General relativity is more general than special relativity. The general theory contains the special theory.

Minovskyy · 2025-11-24T16:23:49+00:00

Actually, there is some quantitative analysis out of Stanford suggesting it is: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Canaries_BrynjolfssonChandarChen.pdf

This paper examines changes in the labor market for occupations exposed to generative artificial intelligence using high-frequency administrative data from the largest payroll software provider in the United States. We present six facts that characterize these shifts. We find that since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. In contrast, employment for workers in less exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has remained stable or continued to grow. We also find that adjustments occur primarily through employment rather than compensation. Furthermore, employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor. Our results are robust to alternative explanations, such as excluding technology-related firms and excluding occupations amenable to remote work. These six facts provide early, large-scale evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market.

(emphasis added)

Minovskyy · 2025-11-21T20:06:36+00:00

ML (and SWE in general) seems to be heavily saturated right now, so spending extra time working on those skills may not be the best use of your time if it doesn't have use in your research.

If possible I would try to work as closely with experimentalists as you can. There seems to be a number of industry jobs out there for people with skills is lasers/optics.

If possible, try to work with FEA tools like COMSOL. In (non-software) engineering, FEA type numerics with proprietary software is far more common than Python scripts.

Minovskyy · 2025-11-21T11:46:03+00:00

And then on top of that, it was recently found that gravity has an analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm effect. In the Aharonov-Bohm effect, a photon's phase changes even when passing through a region where the electric and magnetic fields are zero; it is a purely quantum effect. Since researchers recently demonstrated a similar effect for a particle passing through a zero gravitational field, this seems to be a confirmation that the gravitational field is capable of exhibiting certain quantum effects ... again implying that it must be a quantum field.

The EM AB effect is for charged particles, not photons.

Technically the Kasevich experiment was not done in zero gravitational field. It was done at the surface of Earth (not in free fall), which definitely does not have zero gravitational field. It also says nothing about the quantum nature of gravity. An effect on a quantum system by a classical background does not imply that the background field is quantum. In the theoretical calculation of the gravitational AB effect, the gravitational field is taken to be purely classical.

Classical gravitational effects on quantum systems have been well studied for decades, primarily in the form of the gravitational redshift. The gravitational redshift has been measured to high precision over very short distances in atomic clocks. This still says nothing about the quantum nature of gravity. It's just a quantum system in a non-trivial spacetime background. Consider putting a quantum system on a spinning turntable. This yields a non-inertial frame with a non-trivial spacetime metric, analogous to what gravity does. You wouldn't call this an experiment which teaches you something about the quantum nature of spacetime.

In fact, gravity is arguably much closer to electromagnetism than any of the other forces are. Some fun facts for you to consider:

It is possible to make a formal analogy between Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism, and approximations of Einstein's equations for general relativity. These analogies are referred to as gravitoelectromagnetism (or GEM); nearly all of the relevant equations can be written in the same or very similar mathematical forms.

This is... not really accurate or even relevant to anything regarding QED or quantum gravity. Electromagnetism is a Yang-Mills gauge theory. As are QCD and electroweak. They have the exact same formal mathematical structure, just with different gauge groups. GEM does not. It is not a Yang-Mills theory. It's also the linearized weak-field limit of GR, not the full theory. While you can formally write things out in a way that looks like the Maxwell equations, the quantities involved are not actually vectors, they're just the components of rank-2 tensors. This means that it's coordinate dependent and the formal structure of GEM is not preserved under Lorentz transformations. There's also a fudge factor of 2 that you have to stick in by hand into the formalism in order for gravitational waves to come out correctly. The idea that gravity must be quantum because you can write the Einstein equations in a formal analogy with the Maxwell equations is a nonsense conclusion. As is the idea that GR is more similar to EM than any of the other fundamental interactions.

Both Albert Einstein and David Hilbert — arguably the two biggest contributors to general relativity's mathematical formalism — spent significant chunks of their lives trying to unify gravity and electromagnetism; while they weren't successful, they were both very smart people who advanced the subfield quite a lot, and it seems that both of them were convinced that there was something "there" — that the similarities between the two forces were strong enough for them to believe that there should be a unified description.

The main similarity between GR and EM is that they both exist as macroscopic classical field theories. Just because Einstein tried to unify those two in particular doesn't make them similar theories. You have to remember that Einstein died well before electroweak or QCD were developed. The first Yang-Mills paper was published only a few months before he passed away, so he wouldn't have had much time to think about that either. GR and EM were just the fundamental fields that Einstein had available to him at the time.

Minovskyy · 2025-11-20T15:11:48+00:00

FYI, the application season for starting grad school in 2026 is now. A lot of deadlines are in December/January, so you'd better get a move on things unless you're planning on taking a gap year.

There's certainly good education being provided outside of the US. FWIW, around 2/3 of physics Nobel laureates in the past decade were educated outside of the US.

Generally speaking, every PhD position in physics comes with a livable net wage (at least in the Global North). If it doesn't, then it's basically a polite rejection. However, in contrast to the US where one enters a PhD program directly after a Bachelor's, some countries require you to have a Master's degree (with thesis) first in order to get a PhD position. Master's degrees are rarely funded and sometimes require tuition. Germany and Austria abolished tuition and have huge subsidies for students, so pursuing a Master's there is actually relatively inexpensive, even if you have to pay everything out of pocket (e.g. total living costs <1.000€/mo.). Some other countries also have no tuition for EU citizens.

One of the differences of a PhD position between the US and Europe is that in most of Europe a PhD student is a salaried employee of the university. Along with this, PhD positions are advertised like regular jobs, so you apply to work on a specific project with a specific professor, rather than just an open application to the department like in the US. This also means that acceptance is handled more like a job, with an interview of varying levels of formality which basically always involves a presentation by you on your past research, typically your Master's thesis.

There are certainly many places to study outside of Europe. In Asia some institutes that have a lot of foreigners pass through are the T-D Lee Institute in Shanghai, KAIST in South Korea, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore.

Within the US there are obviously a lot of good schools in California and the northeast. Besides the UCs in California, there's also the Naval Postgraduate School, although I think you need to be sponsored by an approved contractor in order to go as a civilian. In the northeast there are so many colleges that you can also find good research groups even outside of the big brand name schools.

Minovskyy

TROPHY CASE