Physics Society.

[Imwashingmypirate]

Physics guy, you mentioned that you teach and someone said you are a professor. I was curious. What area do you specialise? Kinda feel like you might be a space guy.

[Physics Guy]

As far as teaching goes, technically I can teach whatever I want. I'm required to offer what amounts to one course each semester, but I have Lehrfreiheit—the freedom to decide for myself exactly what it is that I'll teach. In my department nobody is enough of a jerk to teach useless courses and force their colleagues to do all the work of preparing the students to pass their exams, so we just meet every year and agree on who will teach what. Lately I've been alternating between classical electrodynamics and classical mechanics, but before that I was doing advanced quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. I've only taught intro quantum mechanics once or twice, but the last time was in the pandemic and I put a huge amount of effort into a bunch of Powerpoint lectures, with little hand-made cartoons, and so I definitely want to teach that again soon, so I can get some more use from those things. Everyone likes teaching that course, though, so it looks like I'll have to wait another year or two for my turn.

We do exploit our freedom to throw in a few special lectures on pet topics now and then. I've done a course in open system dynamics, and right now I'm coordinating an interdisciplinary seminar with biologists and chemists. I'd like to teach some relativity courses, but one of my colleagues likes that too and I don't want to take it away from them so I'll wait until they decide to give it up. I'm currently coordinating an interdisciplinary seminar with biology and chemistry, and a colleague and I are leading a workshop on scientific writing. Those are voluntary extras besides my mechanics lecture but they're fun and they don't take much time.

Teaching is about 25% of my workload, averaged over the year. The main focus is research, and in that I have slowly migrated. I used to do stuff related to quantum gravity, then I got into atomic and optical physics and also worked with some condensed matter colleagues. I'm a theoretician, and all of physics runs on the same basic engine, so I'm pretty flexible as to subject area. If I want to get into a new topic, I read and ask people questions until I see what the appropriate Hamiltonian functions are in the topic, and then from there I can blunder on by myself.

In the last few years I've been trying to approach biochemistry as nonlinear dynamics, meaning that I'm trying to take theories that are normally applied to systems with only a few moving parts, but complicated interactions, and apply them to huge molecular blobs, with the goal of understanding how those huge molecular blobs manage to push themselves around so efficiently, as long as we eat and breathe. It's a project that's a little bit like trying to express the essence of War and Peace in a sonnet, but it's fun.

[Imwashingmypirate]

As far as teaching goes, technically I can teach whatever I want. I'm required to offer what amounts to one course each semester, but I have Lehrfreiheit—the freedom to decide for myself exactly what it is that I'll teach. In my department nobody is enough of a jerk to teach useless courses and force their colleagues to do all the work of preparing the students to pass their exams, so we just meet every year and agree on who will teach what. Lately I've been alternating between classical electrodynamics and classical mechanics, but before that I was doing advanced quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. I've only taught intro quantum mechanics once or twice, but the last time was in the pandemic and I put a huge amount of effort into a bunch of Powerpoint lectures, with little hand-made cartoons, and so I definitely want to teach that again soon, so I can get some more use from those things. Everyone likes teaching that course, though, so it looks like I'll have to wait another year or two for my turn.

We do exploit our freedom to throw in a few special lectures on pet topics now and then. I've done a course in open system dynamics, and right now I'm coordinating an interdisciplinary seminar with biologists and chemists. I'd like to teach some relativity courses, but one of my colleagues likes that too and I don't want to take it away from them so I'll wait until they decide to give it up. I'm currently coordinating an interdisciplinary seminar with biology and chemistry, and a colleague and I are leading a workshop on scientific writing. Those are voluntary extras besides my mechanics lecture but they're fun and they don't take much time.

Teaching is about 25% of my workload, averaged over the year. The main focus is research, and in that I have slowly migrated. I used to do stuff related to quantum gravity, then I got into atomic and optical physics and also worked with some condensed matter colleagues. I'm a theoretician, and all of physics runs on the same basic engine, so I'm pretty flexible as to subject area. If I want to get into a new topic, I read and ask people questions until I see what the appropriate Hamiltonian functions are in the topic, and then from there I can blunder on by myself.

In the last few years I've been trying to approach biochemistry as nonlinear dynamics, meaning that I'm trying to take theories that are normally applied to systems with only a few moving parts, but complicated interactions, and apply them to huge molecular blobs, with the goal of understanding how those huge molecular blobs manage to push themselves around so efficiently, as long as we eat and breathe. It's a project that's a little bit like trying to express the essence of War and Peace in a sonnet, but it's fun.

WOW, that is amazing and exciting. So you kinda do it all really. My lecturers at Uni did the exact same modules every year but I think an outside company accredits unis here so they have to stick with it or have it reaccredited. I think.

You could turn your powerpoints into an app. Or like a moving ebook. I don't know if there is such a thing as ebooks that allow for animation. That would be cool.

The last paragraph sounds like a challenge life feels complicated, but I suppose if you look at things like bacteria and white blood cells it is easier to imagine them as being blobs that move around needing very little to do their functions. But I know you guys will be able to understand it all better.

I can't remember the courses we studied exactly but probably not too dissimilar. Only one module is different in the applied physics degree than the normal physics degree where I went. So instead of doing advanced optics, I studied applied physical techniques. Basically ultrasound, SEM, AFM, STM and some derivations although I can't remember what they were I just remember memorising the answers lol.

After uni I attempted to become a teacher but I was too quite and the interacting with people became a problem lol. Then I did process engineering for a little while working with semiconductors. Then worked at a uni that works on graphene (wouldn't be hard to work out where but I don't live there anymore), basically working on getting the clean room ready. I worked there in the early days when it was shiny and new and the students and researchers weren't working in there yet. Setting up equipment, ordering things, making SOPs. Lots of pointless meetings about bureaucracy. Then I was a mum and have done nothing since. I do miss working with semiconductors. I really enjoyed getting in about machines. Anyway time to get sorted for school.

Do you have a favourite piece of research that you have done?

[Physics Guy]

I don't think I do have a favourite. The one that I'm just about to finish and submit real soon now is usually the current favourite. Usually there's at least one or two things that I really like about a paper, but you spend so long fussing with all the details that by the time it's finished a lot of it just seems tedious, the cool parts are long familiar, and you're excited about the next thing. That's not a good way to do human relationships but I think it's the right way for things like papers or novels. Once they're published, they belong to everyone, and they're not going to change any more.

I do have some papers I dislike. One in particular is fairly highly cited for a theory paper in its field, and I used to be kind of proud of it, but then recently I read it again. Man oh man. We just rambled on and on jumbling equations together for like a dozen pages, with none of it really going anywhere, except that somewhere in there we smuggled in some convenient but questionable assumptions, so that we produced a nice and manageable equation, plus an impression that it had been derived rigorously. People liked being able to start with our nice equation, so they liked being able to cite our paper for its derivation.

I think we were actually honest about what we were doing, if you read all our fine print, but the thing is so long and confusing that probably no-one has ever read our caveats. I put the paper on the reading list for a seminar once, then took it off and told the class not to bother reading it.

There is still one thing I like about even that paper. Part of our honesty—I wrote it together with a distinguished colleague—was that we invented a fictitious third author with a name that hinted that the paper was maybe not really all that rigorous. Then after the paper was accepted by a journal we had an attack of conscience and wrote to the editor to say that our third author was "ontologically challenged" and should perhaps not appear in the published article. The editor had a robust sense of humour, though, and said something to the effect of, "So what?" So our fictitious colleague has a peer-reviewed paper to their credit.

Everyone's life is different and you have to make your own choices, but just from the narrow viewpoint of physics, your story of completing a degree and doing some work but then leaving the field to become a full-time homemaker—that's all too common a story for women in physics. If you're happy otherwise then of course your life is up to you, but as far as physics is concerned, it would be great if you could get back in at some point. Perhaps dealing with kids at home has made you fierce enough to deal with kids in school and you could try teaching again? Or perhaps there are companies looking for someone to help set up a clean room?

Unfortunately the whole issue of finding work after graduating is one about which I know very little, since I've just stayed inside academia, myself. All I can offer is encouragement. Thinking about trying to get a physics-related outside-the-home job at your stage is absolutely not a crazy dream. It's a perfectly sensible thing to attempt, if you want it. Maybe you can find some people who could give useful advice?

[Imwashingmypirate]

I don't think I do have a favourite. The one that I'm just about to finish and submit real soon now is usually the current favourite. Usually there's at least one or two things that I really like about a paper, but you spend so long fussing with all the details that by the time it's finished a lot of it just seems tedious, the cool parts are long familiar, and you're excited about the next thing. That's not a good way to do human relationships but I think it's the right way for things like papers or novels. Once they're published, they belong to everyone, and they're not going to change any more.

I do have some papers I dislike. One in particular is fairly highly cited for a theory paper in its field, and I used to be kind of proud of it, but then recently I read it again. Man oh man. We just rambled on and on jumbling equations together for like a dozen pages, with none of it really going anywhere, except that somewhere in there we smuggled in some convenient but questionable assumptions, so that we produced a nice and manageable equation, plus an impression that it had been derived rigorously. People liked being able to start with our nice equation, so they liked being able to cite our paper for its derivation.

I think we were actually honest about what we were doing, if you read all our fine print, but the thing is so long and confusing that probably no-one has ever read our caveats. I put the paper on the reading list for a seminar once, then took it off and told the class not to bother reading it.

There is still one thing I like about even that paper. Part of our honesty—I wrote it together with a distinguished colleague—was that we invented a fictitious third author with a name that hinted that the paper was maybe not really all that rigorous. Then after the paper was accepted by a journal we had an attack of conscience and wrote to the editor to say that our third author was "ontologically challenged" and should perhaps not appear in the published article. The editor had a robust sense of humour, though, and said something to the effect of, "So what?" So our fictitious colleague has a peer-reviewed paper to their credit.

Everyone's life is different and you have to make your own choices, but just from the narrow viewpoint of physics, your story of completing a degree and doing some work but then leaving the field to become a full-time homemaker—that's all too common a story for women in physics. If you're happy otherwise then of course your life is up to you, but as far as physics is concerned, it would be great if you could get back in at some point. Perhaps dealing with kids at home has made you fierce enough to deal with kids in school and you could try teaching again? Or perhaps there are companies looking for someone to help set up a clean room?

Unfortunately the whole issue of finding work after graduating is one about which I know very little, since I've just stayed inside academia, myself. All I can offer is encouragement. Thinking about trying to get a physics-related outside-the-home job at your stage is absolutely not a crazy dream. It's a perfectly sensible thing to attempt, if you want it. Maybe you can find some people who could give useful advice?

I appreciate your kind words thank you. Your previous reply did spark that bit in me briefly where I got excited. My kids are old enough that I could go do something but I just don't know if I would be good enough. I wanted to be a Dr for a long time. But I wasn't clever enough. I can't go do that but I did look at further education in ultrasound where you work in a hospital while you learn. But I don't drive so I wouldn't be able to go to the university at the other side of the country when the training is here.

I'm going to pop into uni when the kids are off school. Take them for a visit and show them around. I've arranged to meet up with a lecturer. It might inspire me some more.

I volunteer with kids and I did think about teacher assisting but I'm still having panic attacks and sometimes the kids overwhelm me at the youth club. I don't show it but I just start washing dishes or sweeping the floor. My go to when I'm stressed lol. So I need to work on getting used to people again.

I enjoyed your third partner. Made me chuckle. Lol. I think through life we have regrets, even mild regrets, but they all get us to where we are. Does your paper get backlash because it's long-winded? It's a shame that the paperwork and dotting the i's and crossing the t's takes away the magic. I can imagine that. My skills, when I was working was being an idea generator and problem solver. Not so good at paper work but I did come up with some ideas. One idea I came up with goes through my mind a lot and that's because they didn't use it but it would help with a big problem. Semiconductors are made on round wafers of silicon. You build them up layer by later and over time some product types warp and it damages some of the devices. (A big part of the job was to improve yield by adjusting parts of the process but you couldn't do it willy nilly, you had to do it like a project, test it, see it through to product testing and compare with other wafers in the same batch). The thing is, when you have trenches in the wafers all going the same direction, it kind of looks like corrugated material. Which as you can imagine could warp. They would look like pringles but not as extreme lol. So I suggested they have it so that the trenches aren't all going the same direction but the problem is that would require a massive change in photolithography and then you don't really know because you'd probably lose device space in creating the boundaries anyway. I think the problem probably lies in that some processes vacuum the wafers down and some don't and they are in heat and cooled a lot. The majority of devices on warped wafers work the same as they should, they just have to bin the ones that don't pass testing stage. I don't think I ever saw a wafer with 100% yield. Even handling wafers can damage devices.

I think student finance would cover me to do a masters but I feel I would be jumping in at the deep end. Some days I can barely function. I have chronic pain. I might look into it though because I don't know who I am anymore. That's kind of why I came back to this forum. Try to find me before marriage and kids and life lol.

Why can't you change papers? Can you do an updates paper with adaptions? Have you ever invented anything?

[Physics Guy]

It's an interesting question why you can't go back and revise published papers, nowadays.

Historically, of course, it wasn't physically possible. Papers got printed on paper, and while the current journal issues might lie out on display like magazines in supermarket checkout lines, everything older got bound together in thick hardbound volumes and stored on shelves in university libraries, row upon row upon row, in aisle after aisle after aisle. Libraries needed lots of shelf space, especially older libraries with many journal volumes that might go back into the 1800s. There was no way anybody could decide to revise their old paper from even a few years before and somehow get the changes pasted into all those old library volumes around the world.

You could (and still can) send in an Erratum to the journal, specifying things in your old paper that you now consider to be wrong. I think that all the paper's authors have to submit the Erratum together. Editors have to decide whether to publish the Erratum but they usually do. Today they will then also modify the original paper's web page to include a link to the Erratum, but in the old days it was part of the craft of research to make sure to search for later Errata for any paper you found.

Searching then wasn't Google. You had to physically walk through the aisles, pull volumes from shelves, and flip through pages by hand. You could look through index volumes for keywords, which I think sometimes covered multiple years. Then when you found a paper you wanted to read, and perhaps refer to in future, you photocopied it page by page, possibly using a stack of coins. Professors' offices would have banks and banks of filing cabinets full of collected paper copies, and post-docs who might be moving around the world every couple of years schlepped their ever-growing stacks of photocopies around with them in boxes, hoping to one day have filing cabinets of their own.

And then we would go out and shoot the day's pterodactyl with our crossbows. It sounds like that, how we lived.

Nowadays few journal articles are ever published in print, and most of the older ones—all those millions of old published papers—have been scanned and are available in digital form. Hallelujah. There's no technical reason why a published paper couldn't be continuously revised. All the old versions could be kept, also. And in physics, at least, people have been able to do this, in a practical way, for quite a few years. Even though everybody signs over copyright of an accepted article to a journal, some of which are published for profit by companies, somehow there is a well established legal loophole for posting the entire text of your article to the ArXiv e-print archive, from whence anyone in the world can download the paper for free, any time, legally. The only reason journals exist is to provide the peer review stamp of approval; dissemination of results is almost entirely through ArXiv, in physics.

ArXiv lets you update your articles whenever you like (while keeping all your old versions). But somehow nobody updates anything after the version that has been accepted by a journal. Nobody ever discovers, "Hey, this is a much better proof than the one I used in that paper" and then edits the old paper, on ArXiv, to replace the clunky old proof with the new one.

Instead they just write a new paper, citing the old paper and then explaining the wonderful new, improved proof of its result. That's two wins: you get another paper for your CV, and your old paper gets another citation.

Everyone complains today that there are too many journals and too many papers, with too little new content. So it might be good to change some of the publication practices that have persisted from the print era in order to cut down on this bloat. Perhaps what will happen is that journals and traditional articles will gradually fade in importance and the cutting edge of research will move to wikis that summarise the state of the art on different topics. I think the reason that hasn't yet happened is that maintaining good wikis on many technical subjects that are in rapid development takes a lot of highly skilled and intelligent work, and nobody has been able to figure out how to incentive the people who could do it so that they would do it.

Perhaps this will turn out to be one of the killer apps for large language model AIs, and scientists hoping to score Nobel prizes will stop caring about getting published in Nature and will instead aim for getting mentioned by ChatGPT.

[Marcus]

As far as teaching goes, technically I can teach whatever I want. I'm required to offer what amounts to one course each semester, but I have Lehrfreiheit—the freedom to decide for myself exactly what it is that I'll teach.

What a blessing that is! I've created a couple of courses for my university and I still recall the very first time, and how inordinately pleased I was that the curriculum committee okayed my new course syllabus.

...Searching then wasn't Google. You had to physically walk through the aisles, pull volumes from shelves, and flip through pages by hand. You could look through index volumes for keywords, which I think sometimes covered multiple years. Then when you found a paper you wanted to read, and perhaps refer to in future, you photocopied it page by page, possibly using a stack of coins. Professors' offices would have banks and banks of filing cabinets full of collected paper copies, and post-docs who might be moving around the world every couple of years schlepped their ever-growing stacks of photocopies around with them in boxes, hoping to one day have filing cabinets of their own.

Omg. The memories.

And then we would go out and shoot the day's pterodactyl with our crossbows. It sounds like that, how we lived.

Yes. Yes, it does.

I still recall the very first time I opened a Word document, on a PC at grad school. I was nonplussed by the totally blank screen, and I recall thinking "what the hell am I supposed to do now?!!!"

I tell my twenty-something boys stories like this on occasion. The looks on their faces are priceless.

[Physics Guy]

We have thorough and involved accreditation proceedings, and the finally determined rules for what a student has to do to get a degree are so rigid that they literally have the force of state law. It can take years to get them changed, even if a whole department wants to change them. The thing is, though, that these rules are all about the exams that the students must pass. The exams are separate from the courses, which are in principle simply offered by professors, on an as-is basis, as potential assistance in preparing for the exams. I think the whole system is a holdover from the Middle Ages, along with the tradition (no longer widely practiced but always fondly recalled) that lectures start exactly fifteen minutes late.

That means that my comparatively idyllic lecturing life is counterbalanced by a sometimes gruelling schedule as an examiner. About once a semester on average I have to spend an entire week grilling students in oral exams. I like to say that at least you can't cheat on an oral exam, because if you can fake it with me for an hour, you're not faking. There's an unavoidable subjective element in the grades we assign, though, which can be worrisome, and it's exhausting to ask questions from the same limited set day after day while listening carefully to weigh all the answers. I'm happy on balance but we all have our crosses.

(My limited set of questions that I ask in exams is simply the set I've made up for that, so that my comparisons among students aren't made more difficult by having asked them all different questions. Nobody tells us what questions to ask in exams, but whatever questions we ask are noted down by a third person during the exam, and the notes have to be preserved for at least seven years, or something, because students could in principle sue the department if they were denied a degree after having been asked questions that weren't legitimate exam questions under the program rules. In some ways Germany is every bit as pedantic and bureaucratic as it's reputed to be, and in other ways it's the Wild West. Which things are free and which are tightly controlled are just different from other countries.)

[Imwashingmypirate]

We have thorough and involved accreditation proceedings, and the finally determined rules for what a student has to do to get a degree are so rigid that they literally have the force of state law. It can take years to get them changed, even if a whole department wants to change them. The thing is, though, that these rules are all about the exams that the students must pass. The exams are separate from the courses, which are in principle simply offered by professors, on an as-is basis, as potential assistance in preparing for the exams. I think the whole system is a holdover from the Middle Ages, along with the tradition (no longer widely practiced but always fondly recalled) that lectures start exactly fifteen minutes late.

That means that my comparatively idyllic lecturing life is counterbalanced by a sometimes gruelling schedule as an examiner. About once a semester on average I have to spend an entire week grilling students in oral exams. I like to say that at least you can't cheat on an oral exam, because if you can fake it with me for an hour, you're not faking. There's an unavoidable subjective element in the grades we assign, though, which can be worrisome, and it's exhausting to ask questions from the same limited set day after day while listening carefully to weigh all the answers. I'm happy on balance but we all have our crosses.

(My limited set of questions that I ask in exams is simply the set I've made up for that, so that my comparisons among students aren't made more difficult by having asked them all different questions. Nobody tells us what questions to ask in exams, but whatever questions we ask are noted down by a third person during the exam, and the notes have to be preserved for at least seven years, or something, because students could in principle sue the department if they were denied a degree after having been asked questions that weren't legitimate exam questions under the program rules. In some ways Germany is every bit as pedantic and bureaucratic as it's reputed to be, and in other ways it's the Wild West. Which things are free and which are tightly controlled are just different from other countries.)

AHH, I forgot that everything was done analogously before. I grew up without internet. Can't imagine studying at uni without technology.

I do think it's better to keep the questions the same for fairness reasons. Did the students tell other students the questions so they could prepare or do they all know the questions beforehand?

[Imwashingmypirate]

As far as teaching goes, technically I can teach whatever I want. I'm required to offer what amounts to one course each semester, but I have Lehrfreiheit—the freedom to decide for myself exactly what it is that I'll teach.

What a blessing that is! I've created a couple of courses for my university and I still recall the very first time, and how inordinately pleased I was that the curriculum committee okayed my new course syllabus.

...Searching then wasn't Google. You had to physically walk through the aisles, pull volumes from shelves, and flip through pages by hand. You could look through index volumes for keywords, which I think sometimes covered multiple years. Then when you found a paper you wanted to read, and perhaps refer to in future, you photocopied it page by page, possibly using a stack of coins. Professors' offices would have banks and banks of filing cabinets full of collected paper copies, and post-docs who might be moving around the world every couple of years schlepped their ever-growing stacks of photocopies around with them in boxes, hoping to one day have filing cabinets of their own.

Omg. The memories.

And then we would go out and shoot the day's pterodactyl with our crossbows. It sounds like that, how we lived.

Yes. Yes, it does.

I still recall the very first time I opened a Word document, on a PC at grad school. I was nonplussed by the totally blank screen, and I recall thinking "what the hell am I supposed to do now?!!!"

I tell my twenty-something boys stories like this on occasion. The looks on their faces are priceless.

Lol. I remember at uni a mature student on my course who was an electrician didn't know how to turn the library computers on. Must have been a culture shock for him. But he manages and achieved what he wanted to do.

What do you specialise in? Making course content sounds awesome. I used to love making presentations. Like really LOVE it. Scored quite high (above 90%) on my project presentations at uni. I think that's what I thought being a teacher would involve but really it just involved ridiculous amounts of paper work.