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Wow. Astronomy has always been my dream job so this view is surprising to me. What areas do feel are most exaggerated? Is dark energy a bunch of crap for instan

Wow. Astronomy has always been my dream job so this view is surprising to me. What areas do feel are most exaggerated? Is dark energy a bunch of crap for instance? EDIT: My last sentences sounds snarky in retrospect...I meant do you feel that something like dark energy is played up.

andrewcooke 15y ago
well, my views are probably at one extreme of the spectrum. dark matter and dark energy are both real problems. my beef isn't with the facts, but how they are presented. for example, i am very skeptical that understanding those will have any major practical consequences (the argument being that they are only significant on astronomical scales - if they were somehow available / useful / practical at human scales then they would be much easier to study). the "poetic" value of "understanding our universe" is something separate, of course. most astronomers i know (and i know a lot - my partner is a prof at u chile; chile has a lot of telescopes) love what they do. the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions. if you're considering a career in astronomy i would weigh that much more than my (cranky) opinions on funding. (also, you realise that going observing is not sexy? you're sat in a room somewhere, surrounded by computers, with no windows and a bunch of engineers, so tired that you've got mouth ulcers, eating crap food to stay awake as nothing much happens for hours on end. and the meaning of your data won't be clear until you've done a year more of processing and analysis... :o) ps the most over-sold field currently is planets: very popular; very sexy ("human inhabitable" etc etc); largely pointless. the "dark" problems are at least physics, rather than stamp collecting.
- colkassad 15y ago
  Astronomy is just a dream of mine since childhood...I'm 38 now and set in my career path more or less. I agree with you that professional astronomy is probably not very sexy. My interest lies in the large scale stuff like quasars, galaxy formation, and the physics underlying neutron stars and black holes. For some reason exoplanets don't do it for me. Thanks for the reply...it was very interesting.
  - kirubakaran 15y ago
    "I'm 38 now and set in my career path more or less" Fun exercise: Sit down. Think you just died. Like now. Just turn that around in your mind until it sinks in. Watch (hopefully) many of the rationalizations for your choices fall off. Repeat.
    - colkassad 15y ago
      Sorry, that probably sounded defeatist or something. I meant that I am doing something now that I love, and working towards improving my life through this route. I have many dreams, more than a lifetime's worth :P
- bh42222 15y ago
  the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions So its like every other position in academia then? Also like most private sector jobs in a recession/depression. Really having more opening then applicants is a rarity. Engineers, doctors, some other high demand professions, are all a minority in terms of total labor force in the economy.
  - andrewcooke 15y ago
    you can have many applicants per job even with full employment. my understanding is that astronomy is one of the more competitive areas within academia, but i don't have any figures.
    - colkassad 15y ago
      Do you do any programming? I was curious what problems could be solved by someone who writes code and has a passion for astronomy. I used SDSS data and python to plot high redshift galaxies for a school project. I could clearly see the filaments that make up the large scale structure of the universe. It was a lot of fun and I would like to do similar stuff in the future as a hobby.
      - andrewcooke 15y ago
        sure. you'd be surprised how little maths/physics most software engineers know. so there are lots of jobs out there where knowing that gives you an edge. my first job after astronomy was working for a company that wrote software used in oil surveys. i worked on the mathematical model for a cable towed behind a boat. the maths was trivial, but only one other person in a company of 30ish could understand it (apparently). these days i work for a "geophysics consultancy" (a handful of guys who will write pretty much anything you want, usually related to seismic data processing - most fun recent project was using a GPU). but i've also worked on more "normal" software development projects (j2ee once, for example). to answer your question more directly - most observatories have software engineers on the staff.
    - 15y ago

andrewcooke 15y ago

well, my views are probably at one extreme of the spectrum. dark matter and dark energy are both real problems. my beef isn't with the facts, but how they are presented. for example, i am very skeptical that understanding those will have any major practical consequences (the argument being that they are only significant on astronomical scales - if they were somehow available / useful / practical at human scales then they would be much easier to study). the "poetic" value of "understanding our universe" is something separate, of course. most astronomers i know (and i know a lot - my partner is a prof at u chile; chile has a lot of telescopes) love what they do. the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions. if you're considering a career in astronomy i would weigh that much more than my (cranky) opinions on funding. (also, you realise that going observing is not sexy? you're sat in a room somewhere, surrounded by computers, with no windows and a bunch of engineers, so tired that you've got mouth ulcers, eating crap food to stay awake as nothing much happens for hours on end. and the meaning of your data won't be clear until you've done a year more of processing and analysis... :o) ps the most over-sold field currently is planets: very popular; very sexy ("human inhabitable" etc etc); largely pointless. the "dark" problems are at least physics, rather than stamp collecting.

colkassad 15y ago
Astronomy is just a dream of mine since childhood...I'm 38 now and set in my career path more or less. I agree with you that professional astronomy is probably not very sexy. My interest lies in the large scale stuff like quasars, galaxy formation, and the physics underlying neutron stars and black holes. For some reason exoplanets don't do it for me. Thanks for the reply...it was very interesting.
- kirubakaran 15y ago
  "I'm 38 now and set in my career path more or less" Fun exercise: Sit down. Think you just died. Like now. Just turn that around in your mind until it sinks in. Watch (hopefully) many of the rationalizations for your choices fall off. Repeat.
  - colkassad 15y ago
    Sorry, that probably sounded defeatist or something. I meant that I am doing something now that I love, and working towards improving my life through this route. I have many dreams, more than a lifetime's worth :P
bh42222 15y ago
the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions So its like every other position in academia then? Also like most private sector jobs in a recession/depression. Really having more opening then applicants is a rarity. Engineers, doctors, some other high demand professions, are all a minority in terms of total labor force in the economy.
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  you can have many applicants per job even with full employment. my understanding is that astronomy is one of the more competitive areas within academia, but i don't have any figures.
  - colkassad 15y ago
    Do you do any programming? I was curious what problems could be solved by someone who writes code and has a passion for astronomy. I used SDSS data and python to plot high redshift galaxies for a school project. I could clearly see the filaments that make up the large scale structure of the universe. It was a lot of fun and I would like to do similar stuff in the future as a hobby.
    - andrewcooke 15y ago
      sure. you'd be surprised how little maths/physics most software engineers know. so there are lots of jobs out there where knowing that gives you an edge. my first job after astronomy was working for a company that wrote software used in oil surveys. i worked on the mathematical model for a cable towed behind a boat. the maths was trivial, but only one other person in a company of 30ish could understand it (apparently). these days i work for a "geophysics consultancy" (a handful of guys who will write pretty much anything you want, usually related to seismic data processing - most fun recent project was using a GPU). but i've also worked on more "normal" software development projects (j2ee once, for example). to answer your question more directly - most observatories have software engineers on the staff.
  - 15y ago