If I could go back in time and tell my younger self something about life as a theoretical physicist, I might say: mind the gap between what’s exciting about physics and what the job actually is. My new book, The Edge of Space-Time, was born in part out of thinking about the physical questions that get pushed to the margins in professional physics. Big-picture questions like, what is the material nature of space?
What is a quantum theory of time? It is very difficult to build a professional life working on these questions – even as books tout them as the most exciting ones in the universe. I was recruited into the world of physics by the Errol Morris documentary about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.
Eventually, I read Hawking’s book of the same name and my impression of a working life in physics was that, for the most part, physicists think big thoughts about wonders of the universe every day. Today, I’m a tenured professor of physics at a major research institution, and a lot of my job is sending emails about bureaucratic things, like asking whether anyone can tell me the policy that is governing changes that the university is making to my grant. On a good day, I get to have conversations about science with the postdoctoral fellows I employ in my research group – but that’s not every day.
And in either case, the kind of research that we can get grant funding to do is quite limited. The sort of work Hawking did on the nature of time is financially out of reach for most physicists, a situation that is getting worse as the UK and the US both slash and burn basic science budgets. The Edge of Space-Time was born in this gap between what we say science is and the reality of living it.
I began it at a moment of transition. I had just been awarded tenure, which, in the US, historically has meant my position is permanent, and I am free to research whatever interests me without worrying about being fired. At the moment my tenure became official, I was thinking about what I had given up to get there, the strategic choices I had made.
Why dark matter is still one of the biggest open problems in science I gave up working on quantum gravity, for example, both because of racism I experienced as a PhD student and because the job prospects weren’t good. I never took a class where we were asked to think deeply about time, space and the fundamental nature of space-time. Mostly, I learned to calculate and pursue questions that were broadly agreeable to the physics community, like understanding the nature of dark matter.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
