Dances with physicists

Benka replies: Jeffrey Marque, Charles Hayes, and José Flores have graciously shared their stories, for which I thank them. It is healthy for more physicists working in the private sector to do likewise, especially with students and faculty at their local institutions of higher learning. The latest statistics available from the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/statistics ) indicate that US physics and astronomy departments currently have about 9000 full-time-equivalent faculty, 14 000 graduate students, and 2000 postdocs. We can do the math: Five years from now, most of those faculty will still be where they are today, while most of the students and postdocs will need to find rewarding positions elsewhere. With a cadre of industrial-strength physicists guiding the way into the private sector, a new world of job options will open up.

If I read Joost Mertens’s letter correctly, he seems to draw a sharp separation between physics at universities and “normal” nonacademic physics, with only the latter being concerned with “the objects and materials of the everyday world” while the former merely exists at the fringe of the real world. I disagree. As I explicitly said, “of those who continue to do research within academic physics, more choose to work in areas allied with today’s and tomorrow’s technology … than to pursue answers to eternal questions.” Mertens correctly observes that much research in the private sector is proprietary—silent and secret and invisible in his words, and I would add inaccessible to journalists—and goes on to fear for the loss of physics’s independence. But that is precisely the point: In the halls of academic institutions, that beautiful, independent, comprehensive edifice of physics will, we hope and trust, perpetuate itself for many generations to come; once beyond those halls, however, the tools of the physicist are put to other tasks, even magazine publishing, and the sharp image of a physicist doing physics gets blurred. I for one will no longer think of physicists changing their self-identification as “curious,” even as I continue to seek them in all their guises.

The class taught by John Hauptman and Jennifer Lowery sounds like more than just a terrific way to reach students. It offers a way for all of us, whether in or out of academia, to talk easily about physics with our friends and neighbors, with taxi drivers and pedestrians. Wouldn’t it be nice to collectively raise the visibility of our favorite discipline, and perhaps even demonstrate some of its relevance to the population at large? I think so.