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Particle Physicists Facing Insane Competition For Work
Jim_Austin writes "Teams of hundreds of young scientists — including many grad students and postdocs — staffed the Large Hadron Collider and helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades. Now they must compete for just a handful of jobs. Quoting: '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. The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America.'"
When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.
This isn't new. It's been that way in high-energy physics since A-bombs stopped being cool. After WWII, there was a huge interest in getting into physics, and large numbers of PhD physicists were produced. The U.S. Government hired a lot of them. Nuclear weapon design became excessively fancy, much to the annoyance of today's workers who have to maintain the old bombs.
Then, after the US had produced enough bombs for the next few world wars, the nuclear establishment wound down. Los Alamos got into all sorts of strange non-nuclear stuff like chaos theory. Lawrence Livermore became a senior activity center for aging physicists. The average age of the membership in the American Physical Society went up by six months each year. That was back in the 1990s. It hasn't gotten better.
When the USSR wound down, there was a US effort to find jobs for old Soviet nuclear experts. The worry was that they'd go to work for somebody who still wanted to build a bomb or two. Some came to the US.
This is simply not true. Companies do not usually like to hire physicists, certainly not particle physicists. It is just not widely applicable to industry. Engineers are preferred. That's why there are not many jobs for them.