{"id":365,"date":"2004-09-06T08:23:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-06T15:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/advice\/"},"modified":"2004-09-06T08:23:00","modified_gmt":"2004-09-06T15:23:00","slug":"advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/09\/06\/advice\/","title":{"rendered":"Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a Labor Day special here at Preposterous, we offer some advice for anyone out there who might be thinking of becoming a professional academic physicist. Fortunately, since the spirit of Labor Day is that you&#8217;re not supposed to do any work, I can just link to other people who have already written various pieces of good advice. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Starting at the top, Nobel Laureate <a href=\"http:\/\/www.phys.uu.nl\/~thooft\/\">Gerard &#8216;t Hooft<\/a> offers a crash course (that would only take a few years) on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.phys.uu.nl\/~thooft\/theorist.html\">how to become a good theoretical physicist<\/a>. &#8216;t Hooft, for those who don&#8217;t know, is one of the startlingly smart physicists of the modern era. I interacted with him a little when we were thinking about <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/gr-qc\/9404065\">time travel in three dimensions<\/a>. He would make some sort of claim that we didn&#8217;t believe, and give a thoroughly unconvincing explanation for why it was true, and almost always turn out to be right in the end. My hypothesis at the time was that he was actually a marginally-talented time-traveling physicist from the future, who knew all sorts of true things but had trouble justifying them. But he recommends my <a href=\"http:\/\/pancake.uchicago.edu\/~carroll\/notes\/\">general relativity lecture notes<\/a>, so I have to compliment his taste. (Although he insists on misspelling my name, which you would think he&#8217;d be more careful about, given his own struggles to get people to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.phys.uu.nl\/~thooft\/ap.html\">punctuate<\/a> his name correctly.)  His <a href=\"http:\/\/www.phys.uu.nl\/~thooft\/\">web page<\/a> is also very charming, well worth checking out.<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.utoronto.ca\/~peet\/\">Amanda Peet<\/a>, a string theorist at the University of Toronto (not the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adoring.net\/amandapeet\/\">actress<\/a>), has two very useful advice pages:  one for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.utoronto.ca\/~peet\/home\/straightdope.html\">high school students<\/a> deciding what to major in, and another for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.utoronto.ca\/~peet\/home\/newphd.html\">undergraduates<\/a> contemplating graduate school. Both are aimed at students who are particularly interested in string theory, but much of the advice is pretty universal. (Amanda is also using my <a href=\"http:\/\/pancake.uchicago.edu\/~carroll\/grbook\/\">book<\/a> for a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physics.utoronto.ca\/~phy483f\/\">course<\/a> she&#8217;s teaching this year, so she also gets points for taste. You can see my criteria for deciding whom to link to &#8212; it&#8217;s all about me me me, baby.)<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/math.ucr.edu\/home\/baez\/\">John Baez<\/a> is a mathematical physicist working on quantum gravity, who has become well-known for his wonderful <a href=\"http:\/\/math.ucr.edu\/home\/baez\/FUN.html\">expository articles<\/a> on all sorts of physics topics.  He has a page of <a href=\"http:\/\/math.ucr.edu\/home\/baez\/advice.html\">advice for young scientists<\/a> that covers both philosophical issues and very practical matters.<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Just because you&#8217;ve arrived at graduate school (or become a professor, for that matter) doesn&#8217;t mean you have it all figured out. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.qinfo.org\/people\/nielsen\/blog\/\">Michael Nielsen<\/a> has written a thoughtful series of blog posts on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.qinfo.org\/people\/nielsen\/blog\/archive\/000120.html\">principles of effective research<\/a>, something we&#8217;re all constantly trying to figure out but rarely making explicit. (At the moment the site appears to be down, but I hope I have the url right.)<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>As a more specialized skill, my colleague <a href=\"http:\/\/physics.uchicago.edu\/t_rel.html#Geroch\">Bob Geroch<\/a> has written some <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/gr-qc\/9703019\">suggestions on giving talks<\/a>. Very few people will successfully implement his advice, but if more people at least tried the quality of talks in the field would be immeasurably higher.<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> These are the pieces of worthy advice that I know about; let me know if there are any good ones I&#8217;ve missed. I should say that I only point at all these well-intentioned articles with some trepidation, as reading them all at once could give someone the idea that become a physicist is an incredibly exhausting grind. The impression by no means inaccurate; but the rewards are more than commensurate!<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a Labor Day special here at Preposterous, we offer some advice for anyone out there who might be thinking of becoming a professional academic physicist. Fortunately, since the spirit of Labor Day is that you&#8217;re not supposed to do any work, I can just link to other people who have already written various pieces [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}