“What Does Any of This Have To Do With Physics? Einstein and Feynman Ushered Me into Grad School, Reality Ushered Me Out”, 2016-12-29 (; backlinks; similar):
[Memoir of an ex-theoretical-physics grad student at the University of Rochester with Sarada Rajeev who gradually became disillusioned with physics research, burned out, and left to work in finance and is now a writer. Henderson was attracted by the life of the mind and the grandeur of uncovering the mysteries of the universe, only to discover that, after the endless triumphs of the 20th century and predicting enormous swathes of empirical experimental data, theoretical physics has drifted and become a branch of abstract mathematics, exploring ever more recondite, simplified, and implausible models in the hopes of obtaining any insight into physics’ intractable problems; one must be brilliant to even understand the questions being asked by the math and incredibly hardworking to make any progress which hasn’t already been tried by even more brilliant physicists of the past (while living in ignominious poverty and terror of not getting a grant or tenure), but one’s entire career may be spent chasing a useless dead end without one having any clue.]
The next thing I knew I was crouched in a chair in Rajeev’s little office, with a notebook on my knee and focused with everything I had on an impromptu lecture he was giving me on an esoteric aspect of some mathematical subject I’d never heard of before. Zeta functions, or elliptic functions, or something like that. I’d barely introduced myself when he’d started banging out equations on his board. Trying to follow was like learning a new game, with strangely shaped pieces and arbitrary rules. It was a challenge, but I was excited to be talking to a real physicist about his real research, even though there was one big question nagging me that I didn’t dare to ask: What does any of this have to do with physics?
…Even a Theory of Everything, I started to realize, might suffer the same fate of multiple interpretations. The Grail could just be a hall of mirrors, with no clear answer to the “What?” or the “How?”—let alone the “Why?” Plus physics had changed since Big Al bestrode it. Mathematical as opposed to physical intuition had become more central, partly because quantum mechanics was such a strange multi-headed beast that it diminished the role that everyday, or even Einstein-level, intuition could play. So much for my dreams of staring out windows and into the secrets of the universe.
…If I did lose my marbles for a while, this is how it started. With cutting my time outside of Bausch and Lomb down to nine hours a day—just enough to pedal my mountain bike back to my bat cave of an apartment each night, sleep, shower, and pedal back in. With filling my file cabinet with boxes and cans of food, and carting in a coffee maker, mini-fridge, and microwave so that I could maximize the time spent at my desk. With feeling guilty after any day that I didn’t make my 15-hour quota. And with exceeding that quota frequently enough that I regularly circumnavigated the clock: staying later and later each night until I was going home in the morning, then in the afternoon, and finally at night again.
…The longer and harder I worked, the more I realized I didn’t know. Papers that took days or weeks to work through cited dozens more that seemed just as essential to digest; the piles on my desk grew rather than shrunk. I discovered the stark difference between classes and research: With no syllabus to guide me I didn’t know how to keep on a path of profitable inquiry. Getting “wonderfully lost” sounded nice, but the reality of being lost, and of re-living, again and again, that first night in the old woman’s house, with all of its doubts and dead-ends and that horrible hissing voice was…something else. At some point, flipping the lights on in the library no longer filled me with excitement but with dread.
…My mental model building was hitting its limits. I’d sit there in Rajeev’s office with him and his other students, or in a seminar given by some visiting luminary, listening and putting each piece in place, and try to fix in memory what I’d built so far. But at some point I’d lose track of how the green stick connected to the red wheel, or whatever, and I’d realize my picture had diverged from reality. Then I’d try toggling between tracing my steps back in memory to repair my mistake and catching all the new pieces still flying in from the talk. Stray pieces would fall to the ground. My model would start falling down. And I would fall hopelessly behind. A year or so of research with Rajeev, and I found myself frustrated and in a fog, sinking deeper into the quicksand but not knowing why. Was it my lack of mathematical background? My grandiose goals? Was I just not intelligent enough?
…I turned 30 during this time and the milestone hit me hard. I was nearly four years into the Ph.D. program, and while my classmates seemed to be systematically marching toward their degrees, collecting data and writing papers, I had no thesis topic and no clear path to graduation. My engineering friends were becoming managers, getting married, buying houses. And there I was entering my fourth decade of life feeling like a pitiful and penniless mole, aimlessly wandering dark empty tunnels at night, coming home to a creepy crypt each morning with nothing to show for it, and checking my bed for bugs before turning out the lights…As I put the final touches on my thesis, I weighed my options. I was broke, burned out, and doubted my ability to go any further in theoretical physics. But mostly, with The Grail now gone and the physics landscape grown so immense, I thought back to Rajeev’s comment about knowing which problems to solve and realized that I still didn’t know what, for me, they were.