It amazes me how on a science site that political threads get hit 20 times a minute but pertinent science questions get no hits.
Be patient, we're trying to change that. I think I speak for a consensus of the moderators when I say we want to turn this back into a club for scientists, future scientists and people interested in science. Of course those people will want to talk about politics and dating and music like everybody else, but that should not be our focus.
Some physicists are generally not interested in the low wages of the educational workforce.
Oh there's far more to it than that. Do you know any teachers? Whether in K-12 or a university, their lives are just miserable, between academic politics and children who were raised to nurture only videogame skills.[
You know which way it's going - a plethora of drama students and tourism/ media studies degrees - because science and maths is "too hard".
Over on this side, where we still quaintly write out "mathematics," the issue is not that it's too hard but that it's simply unfashionable. The great intellectual revolution of the 1960s is over and the famous American Pendulum has swung back the other way in its oscillation between extremes, as it does in sex, drugs and everything else. It's been at least 25 years since it became trendy to know absolutely no science. Not coincidentally there's been a matching trendiness in the anti-science of fundamentalist religion.
Physics was not a required subject for me to graduate from high school. I didn't take the class. The class was not offered to people until they had reached 11th grade.
That's incredible and a sad illustration of the American Pendulum. When I was in high school fifty years ago physics and chemistry were required courses in the 11th grade and available as electives in the 10th. Biology was required in 10th, algebra in 8th, Spanish in 7th.
I think it's more about physics being a boring field for most.
String theory? Relativity? Electrons communicating across vast distances instantaneously? What could be more exciting!
Since when has there been money in chemistry or biology?
Chemical engineering is very lucrative. But it's also really demanding. You have to take all the hardest chemistry courses AND all the hardest engineering courses. Not for the faint of heart. I suspect the same will be true of bioengineering very soon.
I know there's plenty of money in computers though. But there is just no challenge and reward as great as Physics to me.
The challenge is in my specialty, the management of the projects and the "information infrastructure." "Software engineering" is a lie. It's really a black art with just a touch of a medieval guild craft. No measurement, no quality assurance, no capturing of best practices, no repeatable processes, no continuous improvement. Yes we talk about those things but they're primtive. The Egyptians who built the pyramids and the Romans who built the aqueducts were better engineers than Bill Gates. The challenge is to build an "information infrastructure" worthy of the name. Today's software is built BY people who love to spend half their lives debugging software FOR people who love to spend half their lives debugging software. Not for the other 5.95 billion human beings.
Being rich doesn't interest me.
You don't have to want to be rich to care about your future. It costs a lot of money to buy a house that is not a 150-minute round-trip from your job, to put two kids through college, to see some of the world's interesting spots, and to manage the retirement portfolio that will be your generation's own responsibility when pyramid of the Social Security Ponzi Scheme collapses on itself.
