Friday, August 30, 2013

Pity the physicists

Via Science Careers, a rather familiar-sounding set of tales about young particle physicists and what they're doing to find a job: 
Young particle physicists face a job crunch that some older physicists have predicted for years. In 2010, researchers at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, started taking data with the world's largest atom smasher, the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Last year, to great fanfare, the LHC blasted into existence the long-sought Higgs boson, the last piece in physicists' theory of the known particles, the standard model. But the huge teams working on the LHC have also cranked out hundreds of Ph.D.s, and with particle physics budgets in the United States and Europe stagnating, there aren't enough academic positions to accommodate them all. 
Within the particle physics community, young researchers themselves are drawing attention to the problem. Over the past 10 months, particle physicists in the United States have conducted a planning exercise that culminated recently in a 9-day retreat at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, called "Snowmass on the Mississippi"—after the ski resort in Colorado where physicists used to gather. The grassroots Snowmass Young Physicist Movement (YPM) conducted an online poll and held more than a dozen town hall meetings to find out what graduate students, postdocs, and untenured faculty members are thinking. "For young particle physicists the issues are jobs, jobs, jobs," says Bjoern Penning, 34, a postdoc at the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, and a co-convener of the Snowmass YPM. 
Young particle physicists say their older colleagues are generally supportive, but don't always fully appreciate their predicament. "I think the senior people, they actually think that if you work very hard, you'll make it, because they made it," says Marcelle Soares-Santos, 31, a postdoc at Fermilab who works on a cosmology project known as the Dark Energy Survey. But that's hardly the case, she says: "We don't control all the variables."
What I found interesting about the article was the seeming understanding amongst young physicists that they would be relatively unlikely to find a position within academic or government laboratory physics. The numerical odds are slim:
The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) The two largest particle detectors fed by the LHC, the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS)—which both independently spotted the Higgs—boast teams of 3000 and 2700 physicists. By themselves, the CMS and ATLAS teams minted at least 174 Ph.D.s last year. That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900. 
In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.
Yikes! At least younger Ph.D. chemists have postdocs to keep a roof over their head... but is that just delaying the transition?  

7 comments:

  1. Another lovely example of the ponzi scheme designed to produce inexpensive scientific research.

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  2. The dangers of too many physicists was evidenced when the superconducting supercollider in Texas was cancelled and thousands of physicists needed a place to work and found it as quants on Wall Street. There they used their mathematical prowess to create the exotic derivatives that brought the world to the brink of economic collapse. It's much cheaper in the long run to keep them busy smashing particles into each other.

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  3. I'm not so sure. Would it be better to have our physicists create new Weapons of Mass destruction, or just weapons of economic destruction?

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  4. I couldn't have described the inter-generational ideologies better. I only wish some of my discussions were more productive with my older mentors. They are getting better as we adjust to the new normal.

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  5. Why are we to feel sorry for these students? If they were so well aware of the job market, they could have not gotten a PhD in something unemployable.

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    1. As much as it feels wrong to blame the victims, I tend to agree with this viewpoint. I've seen enough videos and internet posts of stubborn undergrads insisting they'll be different or worse, just hoping things will improve by the time they get out. Physicists have long known their job prospects are small. Chemists are starting to feel the same pinch, but resisting the message the same way these physicists are.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20