I fly out at some obscene time Thursday morning to hang out with Richard Kenner in Ft. Lauderdale for a few days. Richard is a middle-aged, nudist, Jewish computer wizard from Queens who I met through a friend of a friend. I don't know a lot about him, other than that his software used in airport control towers made him a millionaire, he works on the GNU compiler collection, and he is a major authority on VLSI. He works at NYU and eats lots of cheese sandwiches. Obviously, now that I've done some research, we will have loads to talk about--I mean, I love sandwiches too! If not, since it will be only him, me, and Arynn for six days, we will have a very quiet and awkward trip.
What am I saying? There won't be a dull moment.
I plotted out my course schedule for the next two years. Taking 15 or 16 credits most quarters, I'll be on track to transfer in Fall 2010 (god, that sounds like a long way off), majoring in physics and minoring in something that encompasses database development and computer modeling. Yeah, it sounds real sexy, I know. But CERN's Large Hadron Collider will be producing something like a grillion times the data hosted on the entire World Wide Web every day, and someone's got to make some sense of it. Otherwise they're just bashing little things together for the hell of it. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics says:
Although physics research may require extensive experimentation in laboratories, research physicists still spend time in offices planning, recording, analyzing, and reporting on research.
When I'm not doing the grunt work of analysing the data to see what new particles fall out of the wash, I'll be designing the experiments that could demonstrate or disprove supersymmerty. I'll have front-row tickets to the Big Bang (much harder to get than reservations at Milliway's, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe). My office will be the first set abuzz when string theory finally does something useful--or when it's torn to shreds.
This will make me an experimental physicist, not a theorist. So I won't be able to claim Drs. Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Richard Feynman, or Bertie Oneglass as my professional kindred. Experimental physics doesn't seem to produce celebrity quite the same way. Soo...I guess if I still feel the need for hot groupie action, I may need to moonlight as a rockstar after all.
