I graduated in 1993 with a physics Ph.D and after a short post-doc, went off to work as an options trader and “quant”. After 22 years in that area, I realized that physics is actually back to being interesting again – 22 years ago, people were saying that fundamental physics was all done, with the invention of string theory and that other people would be shortly out with a numerical computation of the mass of the electron from fundamental principles (some combination of π,γ (Euler’s constant) and some simple integral of a dimensionless variety). None of this has come to pass. The discovery of accelerating expansion of the universe, dark matter, dark energy, the realization that gravity might be the key to many of these puzzles – have left us (possibly!) at square one. We might be at the dawn of a new paradigm shift, which might happen tomorrow with some unexpected discovery either by a satellite or at a particle collider, or might happen two hundred years from now. Either way, we are all at sea, maybe not knowing what happened in the intervening years is better.
Anyway, with the ability to pursue interesting projects, I decided last year to get back to physics. Twelve months later, having attended three physics schools aimed at graduate students and post-docs, as well as working on some courses offered by one of the physics stars at Rutgers University, I feel that I am close to finding something to work on.
As I learn new things, I will post interesting ideas that I am playing with here. I don’t have the all-round expertise of a Matthew Strassler (https://profmattstrassler.com/), the sheer genius of a Lubos Motl (http://motls.blogspot.com/), the current up-to-date-ness of Sabine Hossenfelder (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/) or the point of view of Peter Woit (http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/). There is still room for the Simply Curious.
If you want to discuss stuff in a peaceable, civilised way, feel free to post. If you are angry at something, look elsewhere. And if you want to inform me about aliens in pre-history, I am simply not interested.
Simply Curious 