Freshman physics classes almost always start with the same speech. "Look at the student on your left. Look at the one on your right. By the end of the semester, only one of the three of you will still be here."
That familiar speech sets the stage for all that is to come in the professional life of a physicist, up to and including tenure. Only the fittest survive, and many are unfit. Including me. I used to think it was because I wasn't as smart as the lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) few who made it to tenure. Now I know that isn't the case at all. I just didn't like the work.
My first two years of graduate school in astrophysics were wonderful. I started out baffled by some of the simplest consequences of Newton's laws of gravity and ended up understanding many, but certainly not all, of the implications of Einstein's awesome General Theory of Relativity. It was an exhilarating intellectual journey, and one I am still happy I made. But at the end of that race through almost 400 years of human accomplishment, I crashed. Or more accurately, I crashed into research.
At the time, I shared my professors' and fellow graduate students' belief that the best students became researchers. Since I was doing very well in my classes, it naturally followed that I was destined for a life of research. I was trained as a theoretical astrophysicist, so for me that meant I would spend the rest of my days at the computer writing elaborate numerical codes to simulate the many ways by which an invisible black hole weighing almost as much as the Milky Way makes itself known to the rest of the universe.
There was only one problem: Writing computer codes is boring. Sure, there are those moments when everything comes together, and the computer spits out enlightenment in the form of long strings of semi-comprehensible numbers. But those moments are almost as few and far between as the black holes themselves. Mostly, building a simulation requires hours upon hours of searching through thousands of lines of code to find a missing factor of two or an erroneous minus sign. If you miss even one, the program will crash and you will have to start the whole process over again. And again. Eternally.
The tedium almost killed me. My brain was operating at high speed, but my body and spirit were withering. With a lot of help and encouragement from my wife, my adviser, and my colleagues, I managed to drag myself to the top of the mountain and earn my Ph.D. I was so energized by the accomplishment that I blundered into the biggest mistake of my life: I accepted a postdoc.
So after almost 12 years living in large culturally rich and diverse metropolitan areas, I found myself sentenced to three years of postdoctoral "study" in a small Midwestern land-grant university town. I hated it. My wife hated it. Our pets, the little traitors, loved it. They finally had a yard of their own. But they never had to leave their Garden of Eden. And they certainly didn't have to go face that horrible computer screen covered with lines of inscrutable computer code every day. One of my equally unhappy coworkers likened it to compulsory military duty -- just serve your time and then get on with your life.
But wasn't my life supposed to be astrophysics research? Had I been a fool to think that I loved astronomy, math, and physics? How could I have been that unaware of my own likes and dislikes? All good questions, but at the time I had no answers for them. I just knew that I had to get out of research, whatever it took. Looking back, I realize that my postdoctoral experience taught me that my dissertation research had been a kind of personal Mount Everest. And though I was proud to have reached the summit, I certainly didn't want to live there.
To make a long story short, I started writing. After I stopped doing research, I was unemployed and living with my in-laws. I desperately needed work and money. I found an online science magazine that was willing to pay me to write about my adventures hunting for a job, so I did that. My editor liked my work and recommended me to a few other editors at other science publications. One article led to another, and pretty soon (two years, roughly), I was a full-time freelance science writer.
So less than two years after leaving research and thinking I was banished from science forever, I am right back in the thick of things. When cosmologists reported new evidence that the universe is flat, I wrote an article about it. When physicists made heat flow from cold to hot, an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics, I wrote an article about it. And when fire recently threatened nuclear-weapons researchers at Los Alamos, I wrote about that, too. Finally, after years of searching, I have stumbled into a job that I actually enjoy doing.
So what made the difference? Mostly, I think it is the variety. Instead of having to focus deeply and work methodically on one particular problem, I am now expected to hop nimbly from one article to the next. And I am never working on just one piece at a time; two or three is more common. Five or six is ideal. My restless intellect seems naturally suited to the constant change, and I am never bored as long as there is another article to write. And, as you can probably tell, I do love to write.
So please, please, please, don't ever make the mistake that one of my wife's colleagues did. Upon hearing that I had left research to become a science writer, he congratulated me on the "decent compromise" I had made. It is no compromise. In every sense that is important to me, life in the "real world" is infinitely better than it was inside the Ivory Tower.
Of course, I never did escape the computer screen; I'm typing at one now. But at least I can read all the words.
