[ComputerPerson]

Politely, absolutely not.

Physics as a domain is a nightmare. Even the employment statistics are hard to understand because, like Philosophy, only the best of the best pursue it.

I've had countless friends throughout my PhD studies tell me that their decision to pursue a PhD in Physics ruined their lives. (Which is an exageration, but you get the point.)

The bottom line is that you should pusue Physics only if you still want to in the face of excessive media/reccomendations/statistics telling you not to.

[drob518]

My university had a great Physics department (Nobel laureate level), but every year you’d have a bunch of junior year (year 3) physics students desperately trying to switch into engineering as they realized that making a go of a pure physics degree was going to be more difficult. It was a consistently repeating pattern.

[pdhborges]

At least in europe you can do a 3 year Eng Phys BSc and if it doesn't pan out you can do a master in EE or MEng.

[l33tman]

The engineering programs and their curriculums are very different from physics in the science faculties (which I guess was the context here)

[biophysboy]

Counterpoint: my entire physics phd cohort is doing great now and it didn’t ruin our lives.

I think better advice is “do you want to work in this specific lab for 5 years?”, not “do you really want to do physics”? Talk to the lab members, learn what they do.

[efficax]

That's funny because so many of us in my PhD philosophy program would say: I should've been a physicist, philosophy ruined my life. I had a physics prof who told me it was foolish to go into philosophy when I could've been a physicist and I thought I knew better. Oh well, I probably would've been a software engineer in the end no matter what.

[scarmig]

I know multiple Physics PhDs who are living rich, happy lives.

Though, mostly by abandoning the field and moving to Anthropic.

[ModernMech]

Pick any field and you'll find countless PhDs eager to tell anyone who will listen all the ways it ruined their lives.

[CamperBob2]

Exactly. These fields demand all you've got. Otherwise, you'll fall behind those who are willing to sacrifice everything else for the quest, so to speak. There will always be a long-tailed distribution populated largely by smart people with personal regrets.

Experimental physics is worrisome because as education becomes less-valued by society, there will be less funding available for research in general. Costly and elaborate 'big science' projects -- the kind that have to span multiple Presidential administrations in the US -- will be among the first to be classified as "waste," and performatively killed by legislators who earn votes by emulating the feeble-minded cultists who elected them.

I think the way forward, at least in the US, is going to involve leveraging AI to build better models to reduce our dependence on experiment. This will be true of both biology (where's the next HeLa line going to come from, once Christian nationalists complete their takeover of NIH?) and physics (ditto the next RHIC or SLAC.)

Yes, this policy amounts to eating the next generation's seed corn, but that's what Americans are voting for.

[scheme271]

Experimental physics isn't just the high energy particle stuff even though that tends to get more media attention. There's a lot of condensed matter, solid state, etc stuff where you can do cutting edge research on a table top or close to it.

[ModernMech]

As someone with a BS in physics, my advice to anyone who wants to study applied physics is to do robotics. Plenty of applied physics work to go around.

[coderatlarge]

i would make a similar argument for entrepreneurship and most things: do it only if you can’t bear the thought and reality of doing something else.