alt Hacker NewsTip for smart science-y young people: think about a career in experimental physics. Experimental data is the complement of theoretical power. Since theory can be provided cheaply by LLMs, experimental ability is now the bottleneck for progress in physics.
I expect to see frontier labs or startups hiring experimentalists to provide data for LLMs to analyze, pushing towards breakthroughs in areas like room-temperature superconductors and fusion.
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If (it will) it continues like this and the line is step, as soon as math is solved good enough, the next frontier will be solved.
In regards of experimental physics, i would even argue this is being worked on for sure. The ML machines are now big enough that simulations are getting better and better fast.
Until we got robots doing that
Only theory that is a convex combination of existing theory. Any paradigm shift is currently unreachable to LLMs and can be only obtained by luck with RL due to the curse of dimensionality.
This sounds depressing. Imagine going to work every day and your boss is a computer telling you to do rote nonsense so it can barely-better-than-brute-force search for breakthroughs in whatever field. Then when it finds one we get another breathless news cycle like this while you get no credit at all. If you could understand what you were working on, you might be able to contribute more than a .csv of data, but the computer can't read you in because there is no understanding under the surface.
Not a physics guy but isn’t experimental always the bottleneck?
ITT: people who think there’s going to be jobs.
How’s this different from just asking an llm to prompt you to perform experiments? You don’t need any expertise.
Politely, absolutely not.
Physics as a domain is a nightmare. Even the employment statistics are hard to understand because, like Philosophy, only the best of the best pursue it.
I've had countless friends throughout my PhD studies tell me that their decision to pursue a PhD in Physics ruined their lives. (Which is an exageration, but you get the point.)
The bottom line is that you should pusue Physics only if you still want to in the face of excessive media/reccomendations/statistics telling you not to.