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Maybe the math, but not necessarily the physics. It's a matter of specialization and perseverance. Think of all the thousands of physicists keeping CERN running
by JabavuAdams 5y ago
Maybe the math, but not necessarily the physics. It's a matter of specialization and perseverance. Think of all the thousands of physicists keeping CERN running. These people are smart, know a lot, and have worked a lot of problems, but I'm not sure they're a cut above engineers and/or software devs who have the same depth of experience.
- wittycardio 5y agoThe physicists don't "keep it running ". They have engineers and technicians and so on for that. They come up with models ,design experiments and analyze results of extremely complex phenomena. Almost all of them also have a PhD, they are a lot smarter than your average software team. Okay if you compare them to say people working on compilers at Google , it might be similar, but not to your average team
- lumost 5y agoConsider that there is also an extreme selection bias for who studies higher physics in terms of motivation to study physics vs. desire/need for money. Given that the income delta between a researcher at CERN and a professional software engineer at Google is >10x I'd be skeptical that this selection always translates to intelligence. Anecdotally, many PhD Physicists transfer into software for monetary reasons and do not come across as intrinsically smarter than the average engineer of equivalent experience.