I guess what i’m trying to say with this post is that “running off to industry” does not have to be only about the money and “selling out”, as the academics seem to assume
It’s the difference between “you’re nothing more than a calculus-teaching monkey to us” and “we’d be lucky to have you”
It’s amazing how often people–or institutions!–who tell everyone else to fuck off, explicitly or implicitly, don’t seem to understand all the off-fucking that subsequently occurs.
I don’t think I’ve told this story on here before, but when I was going into college I was seriously considering a physics major. My first semester I took linear algebra and honors physics 1.
The fact that I wound up ditching physics after that semester is primarily attributable to two things. One is that the honors physics class was terrible. By which I mean the lecturer was terrible, by which I mean he might be the most soporific lecturer I have ever heard. He told stories about Feynman pranks–he had been in grad school at Caltech when Feynman was teaching there–and made them boring. It was kind of impressive.
But more important is that I was interested in theoretical physics. And the physics department made it pretty clear that those of use who were interested in theoretical physics were not physicists and did not count and were not welcome. Because physics, you see, consists of experiments, and if you are not personally doing experiments you are not a physicist.
I had a friend who was in the same position I was, except his advisor was the head of the physics department. And this gentleman told him, and I believe this is a direct quote, “Theoretical physics isn’t really physics. If you want to do theoretical physics you should go be a math major instead.”
He was both shocked and angered when my friend changed from a physics major to a math major, and switched advisors to someone in the math department. Angered enough that he went to talk to my friend’s new advisor and explain to her that my friend was a good physicist and she needed to get him back into the physics major.
As far as I know, the physics major at my undergrad is still small and unpopular. As far as I know, the physics department has no idea why.
