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Experimental physicists journey is similar to startup founder They have to figure out which "idea" they want to commit for a very long time. They have to convi
by praveen9920 6y ago
Experimental physicists journey is similar to startup founder
They have to figure out which "idea" they want to commit for a very long time. They have to convince a rich person/org to fund their expensive experiment. Work hard to get things right. Have patience until you get it right.
Success will give you recognition and money and in some cases probably Nobel (being a unicorn). Failure will get you lot of learnings and probably some recognition too ( for proving something wrong). Unfortunately, there is one more state, being in limbo and not going anywhere.
As long as you are having fun in what you do, it is worth it.
Note: I am not an experimental physicist.
- Herrin 6y agoI was an experimental physicist, and I'd say that's a reasonable comparison to make. The time scales are much longer, unfortunately. Instead of taking one or two years to get a company off the ground, it can be more like five for an experiment[1]. I'd attribute this to slower iteration. You end up throwing away or rebuilding a lot of physical things, many of them bespoke, on the way to a working apparatus. Also, the compensation is much worse for experimental physics. For he first decade of your career, you work as a grad student, then a post-doc, for slightly above poverty wages. This does have the advantage of meaning you work with very motivated people, but you're giving up a lot for that. [1] The XENON experiments from the article (10, 100, and now 1 Tonne) have been developed over about 15 years, for example