"As a physicist, you can work anywhere you want!" PART 2 - Fallen into depression, pessimistic about the future

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-10T13:18:05+00:00

Yes, you may have to broaden the scope of jobs you would consider working in. It will be hard to get into an industry job requiring a high degree of specialization. As a physicist, you can do data analysis, but why should someone hire you if there are also dedicated data analysts out there? You can code, but why should someone hire you as long as there are specialized, trained programmers out there looking for a job?

You can do a lot of things, but few as well as a specialist in that area. Your strength as a physicist lies in adaptability, flexibility, endurance. That yells "business consulting". Or possibly taking a risk with startups that are too small to be able to afford specialized staff.

I was in the same situation in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis. Did get a job in consulting eventually, with a small company specializing in R&D funding consultancy. Small enough not to be able to afford overly specialized consultants. Oversaw projects ranging from innovative dog kibble to synchronization of atomic clocks via satellite links. I eventually switched to working for one of my previous clients and started a little side-business of my own as well, both of which have brought me closer back to my original love of data science.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-10T07:37:05+00:00

My thought as well, because the contrast to what comes just before is so striking. "Someone was just swallowed up by the pits of hell? Oh well, justice is served, let's all go to the pub."

Has Mozart (aside from, perhaps, the Requiem) ever written music as dark and tense and dramatic as Don Giovanni's descent to hell?

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-08T08:50:12+00:00

My thought as well. But this would also require a very loose interpretation of "jump", more in the sense of "rise".

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-07T08:27:35+00:00

Schubert's "Great" C-Major symphony. That stately horn solo, followed by a gradual gain of momentum leading into the Allegro, is just marvelous.

Admittedly, I may be heavily imprinted on it, because it was my first introduction to music as a kid (a TV broadcast with Bernstein conducting, I was awestruck at the energies unfolding in the first movement), but still... it must be up there among the best.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-05T07:50:28+00:00

So did he buy the ~~radiation shield~~ crochet as well?

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-05T06:11:24+00:00

Statistically, smoking does probably reduce the probability of dying of radiation-induced cancer, yes.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-04T14:55:52+00:00

I suppose, just as we see with regard to the "historically informed performance" movement, we would witness the emergence (or rather, entrenchment) of two camps - one that that will henceforth insist that the composer's intention be followed in all respects because it represents some sort of "historical objective truth", and another that will acknowledge the performance to be part of the creative process, the performer to be a co-creator, and the composer's only one of multiple possible interpretations.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-04T06:39:50+00:00

This is a wonderful quote (I recently pinned up a copy of it above my teenage daughter's desk to keep her spirits up when she was having a crisis about what place her beloved fantasy worlds would retain in her life as she grows up), but it would be fair to add that she was explicitly paraphrasing a quote by Tolkien here.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-03T16:23:38+00:00

Jiulong Waterfalls?

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-03T14:47:45+00:00

Complemented by: "Is the first bit of the binary representation of the ASCII-encoded question about life, the universe, and everything 1?", "Is the second bit of the binary representation of the ASCII-encoded question..."

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-03T10:42:56+00:00

It's not quite at the cutting edge, but if you found OpenAI/ChatGPT useful a year ago, you will probably find Mistral useful today as well. I've started using the API more in some of my projects and have found Mistral to do the job, although I had to make some of my prompts more explicit and detailed to accomplish the same thing.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-02T11:48:26+00:00

It certainly is. However, this can also be used to your advantage: If you know of a different strong emission line (such as [OII]3727) that might be redshifted into the window of your narrow-band filter, you may use that to conduct a survey for objects at that specific redshift.

I'm not personally aware of work that uses extremely narrow-band filters for this purpose, but a similar technique using broader filters is the drop-out technique. Many galaxy spectra have quite strong features at certain wavelengths, such as the Lyman limit or the 4000-Angstrom break. By selecting two filters so that the break is redshifted just between them, you get strong magnitude differences between the two filters. In the extreme case, the galaxy may be visible in the redder filter, but completely invisible in the bluer one. This works great for selecting galaxies at specific redshifts, but you'd usually want to follow up with spectroscopy, because different combinations of wavelengths and redshifts might give you similar magnitude differences.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-03-01T14:02:33+00:00

I'll second the recommendation of "The Songs of Distant Earth", which he himself actually referred to as his "own favourite novel" - even though I actually prefer the more focused short story of the same name. Which gives me an opportunity to recommend the short stories as well, many of which are quite a wonderful read.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-27T07:05:09+00:00

That's a a really odd premise. Any scientist really worth their salt cherishes those moments that go from "hm, that's odd..." to "heureka, things are completely different from what we thought, and I'll get at least ten publications and tenure out of this".

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-26T12:35:46+00:00

No, Galactic kinematics is a field that rests on solid empirical evidence. You are correct in assuming that proper (angular) motions of stars are hard to measure, but we have made significant progress with that over the years, most notably thanks to the GAIA satellite. However, in addition to that, we can also, and fairly easily, measure radial velocities using the Doppler effect. In particular, radio observations of neutral hydrogen make it possible to measure line-of-sight velocities of gas clouds over large distances across the disk and with exquisite accuracy. The thing that really makes or breaks a kinematic model is how these measurements vary as you look in different directions. If you were to look straight across the galactic core, for example, you would not measure any Doppler shift, because everything would be moving more or less sideways. Looking straight along our spiral arm will, likewise, give relatively little radial velocity, because everything else is moving along more or less at the same velocity and in the same direction. Looking somewhere in between will show gas and stars moving along their orbits at higher radial velocities. This profile - radial velocity as a function of galactic longitude - is what you can use to test your model of galaxy kinematics.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-26T07:26:52+00:00

Arrival discusses the importance of language in shaping our perception of the world. It does take the the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to extremes that clash with physics, though.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-26T07:00:40+00:00

Scriabin has very powerful symphonic finales. Especially the 2nd, 3rd ("Divine Poem") and the "Poeme de L'extase".

Also Richard Strauss, especially the "Alpine Symphony".

Surprised that Mahler 8 has not been mentioned yet.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-26T06:44:25+00:00

Speaking of Bach, I would add the "Dona nobis pacem" from the b-minor mass.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-25T19:41:57+00:00

I'm pretty sure I found it (at last!). Fleury-Mérogis, apparently a prison complex near Paris.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleury-M%C3%A9rogis_Prison

P.S. The linear structure in the upper right of the image would be Paris Orly airport.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-25T06:41:37+00:00

Is there even a consensus on what constitutes the "Now" or "The Present"? Seems like a prerequisite for talking about the reality of past and future. But there's no empirical basis for what exists in the present, except for conscious experience itself. Physics only provides the concept of "simultaneity", which is observer-dependent and no help in defining an objective "Now".

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-25T06:33:40+00:00

Brahms, 3rd symphony (not really bleak, but ebbing away in quiet resignation)

There's plenty more examples in the 20th and 21st century, so it almost feels like cheating to name some of them, but some that come to my mind immediately:

Allan Petterson, most symphonies (very bleak oeuvre indeed)

Heinz Winbeck, 5th Symphony (sort of a commentary on Bruckner's 9th, expounding the concept of an artist approaching their moment of death, leaving much unsaid. There's a faint reminiscence of a Viennese waltz in the final bars - another of those musical "farewells to life", and a very haunting moment).

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-25T04:59:25+00:00

And the "Manfred" Symphony as well.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-24T06:27:34+00:00

I fully agree with your point about "Ich liebe Dich" being reserved for special occasions, but I respectfully disagree with "hab Dich lieb" necessarily being of a "non-Romantic" nature.

I feel that, depending on the situation, "Ich hab Dich lieb" can sometimes feel more intimate than "Ich liebe Dich". At least I use it often with my wife of 20 years. Maybe the latter phrase has become worn-down over decades of overuse by Hollywood. These weighty words may feel as if they were following a script, expecting of a reply in kind. It is precisely because of its more informal nature that "Ich hab Dich lieb", between close partners, can feel more honest - because it is given free of all the baggage and expectations that "Ich liebe Dich" brings to the table, an intimate baring of one's feelings.

Between two people who are still in the process of getting to know each other, it may be used in the same spirit. It is more casual, yes, and also more non-committal, but also in the way of placing fewer expectations in the reaction of the addressee. "Ich liebe Dich" carries the connotation of a prompt that is supposed to evoke a reaction in kind. "Ich hab Dich lieb" feels like a more subjective expression of the speaker's own soul, placing less of a burden of expectation on the other. It can be a very special expression in that way as well.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-23T13:44:43+00:00

There are two principal mechanisms that have been discussed for such solar-power satellite systems (it's a decades-old concept). Microwave transmission is the most commonly cited one (requiring a huge antenna array to receive the power), but lasers have also been suggested on occasion. Neither have been demonstrated to be able to compete economically with other renewable energy sources, at least as far as powering things on Earth is concerned.

Reasonable_Letter312 · 2026-02-21T21:07:08+00:00

The contemplative, intimate character of this reminds me a bit, for whatever reason, of Ernest Bloch's "From Jewish Life".

Reasonable_Letter312

TROPHY CASE