BELIEVE   ME   NOT!    - -     A   SKEPTIC's   GUIDE  

"Doing Physics"

There is more to this story, of course. Whether for some excellent, deep reason or just because of the practical benefits to society, professional Physicists are also almost always selected and trained to enjoy "doing Physics." You will hear this phrase used frequently among Physicists. What does it mean? How do you "do" the underlying principles governing the behaviour of the universe? You don't, of course; when we use this phrase we are talking about capital-P Physics, the human enterprise.

There are several aspects to "doing Physics." I will list them in what is, for me, today, ascending order of "enjoyability." There is no reason why anyone else should agree with this order, but I believe in full disclosure.

• Politics - explicitly sociopolitical activities usually involving distasteful compromises.
  • Applying for grants:  Mercifully, novices are spared the dirty work of grantsmanship for the first few years of their involvement with Physics.
  • Getting papers published  as distinguished from writing papers, which (along with giving lectures) falls more into the "fun" category. If a novice writes a publishable paper there will usually be some mentor willing to do the dirty political work of getting it published (usually in return for co-authorship).
  • Managing equipment:  The ugly part of experimental science is bound up in the politics of getting money to buy equipment, organizing it and finding places to set it up, keep it running etc. so that the novice experimenter can focus on actually getting the apparatus to work, which is (relatively speaking) the fun part.
  • Managing people:  Although the practice of Physics has an intrinsically solitary aspect, many projects can only reach fruition when many people join in a common effort; in these cases it is arguable that the most important people involved are those who provide leadership and organization. Fortunately, in Physics such positions are rarely occupied by those who just like telling others what to do. Physics has room for an astonishing variety of personal styles, which makes it a rewarding field in which to be an administrator, providing of course that one enjoys people generally.
  I am not a very enthusiastic manager, as you may have surmised, but even in politics there is room for real satisfaction. There can be quite a thrill in obtaining a few billion dollars for the construction of the world's greatest accelerator or managing a huge army of Ph.D. physicists to accomplish a spectacularly ambitious task taking hundreds of person-years of intense effort; however, like all forms of satisfaction related to power, these fade with familiarity and eventually demand greater and greater achievements to maintain the glamour. If you get aboard this vehicle, be sure to plan carefully where you want to get off.

• Craftsmanship - the fulfillment of the artisan.
  • Tinkering with the apparatus:  Before experimental equipment or theoretical models can be used to conduct a conversation with Nature, they have to be working properly. Achieving this state is nontrivial. In fact it takes most of the effort; once the apparatus it working and configured for the desired task, "getting the answer" can be just a matter of "turning the crank" and watching the results pour out. But first you must get to know the equipment intimately, and there is only one way to do that: by using it.
  • Problem solving:  This is an absolutely essential aspect of "doing Physics" that is often neglected by novices, with catastrophic consequences. It is one thing to understand physics and quite another to be able to put that understanding to work. A good metaphor is the difference between a brilliant automotive mechanic and a great driver. It will help a lot if you know how your car works, but winning the Molson Indy takes something else. Driving experience will also help you be a better mechanic, and that's an aspect of this metaphor I want to explore later. But for now I can't emphasize strongly enough that most of the hard work in a Physics apprenticeship is in learning how to solve problems - and the only way to learn that is by doing it - a lot of it. This puts most people off at first. I know it did me.
  • Engineering:  Once you know how to solve problems, you pick the ones you want to solve and you learn how to put the solutions to work in the real world. This is what I call Engineering, the art of making Technology work. Lots of people will be offended by the fact that I placed this rather extensive field of endeavour so far toward the "not so enjoyable" end of my ordered list of Physics activities; they should not be. For one thing, this is just a list of my personal tastes. For another, just because I don't enjoy Engineering as much as (for instance) writing does not mean I don't appreciate it; in fact, some of the most satisfying work I have ever done would fall into this category. Just as the most enjoyable activities can be made unpleasant by excess (writing a Ph.D. thesis is rarely a pleasant experience, but it is almost always a satisfying one), drudgery in the service of an inspiring goal can leave very pleasant memories.
  Not surprisingly, I like an athletic metaphor for Craftsmanship in Physics: competing in the World Championships may be the ultimate experience for the athlete, but it represents a very tiny fraction of the athletic experience, most of which consists of endless gruelling workouts that are rarely pleasant but always rewarding, both in terms of the final goal and in terms of hard-won accomplishment. There is only one way to find out what you can do, and that's by doing it.

• Teaching - sharing your understanding.
  • Lecturing:  finding a really nice way to get across to others what I have just figured out myself.
  • Writing:  same as lecturing except one gets more time to perfect one's delivery. Here I include the electronic version(s) of "writing" as a natural extension of words on paper; the Web also offers an opportunity to use more tools similar to those one might employ in lectures, like sound and images.
  I am not counting the "political" aspect of professional teaching -- organizing lectures, preparing and marking homework and exams, making judgements about other people's performance and submitting those evaluations in the form of marks. This has little to do with the fun part of teaching except insofar as the one makes a place for the other to happen.

• Learning - the interface between Physics and physics.
  • The glimpse of Nature:  When you finally finish fiddling with the apparatus (whether theoretical or experimental) and it seems to be working, it makes a sort of conduit through which a shy Nature can reveal her secrets;^2.4 such moments are rather rare, and too often occur when the experimenter (or theorist) is dead tired, but one glimpse is usually all it takes to make it all seem worthwhile.
  • The epiphany:  After you have assembled all you know about a new subject and stirred the mix long enough, something starts to congeal and the primal "Aha!" bursts through all the layers of confusion to enlighten you for a while. For me this almost always takes the form of a metaphor that lifts my comprehension from the realm of Physics and plants it in the Platonic ideal world of physics. (Or so it seems; but after all, Reality is what we make it....)