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#51
03-18-2005, 06:06 PM
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Re: Hardest to easiest
[ QUOTE ]
None of this is meant to suggest physics is really easy, because it isn't. Becoming a faculty member at say a top 10 department would be a very high bar, and indeed might be completely unachievable for lots of people. [/ QUOTE ] having seen some of the work the kids do around here, i'd be very suprised if getting an undergrad degree in physics weren't completely unachievable for a gigantic proportion of the population. i was good at math/physics in high school and consider myself fairly intelligent, and i have serious doubts as to whether or not i'd be able to pass any of the higher-level physics courses here on my first try. 
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#52
03-18-2005, 06:07 PM
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Re: Hardest to easiest
So I have a question - when the first man on Mars is Chinese and not American, will it be because our rocket scientists spent so much time posting on poker forums about how hard their job was?
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#53
03-18-2005, 06:09 PM
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Re: Hardest to easiest
In terms of how long a player can sustain their job in a field poker is #1 in difficulty followed closely by football. In terms of how much effort one must put in on a daily basis, its varies tremendously but poker would now fall to the bottom. So basically this just kindof doesnt work.
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#54
03-18-2005, 06:24 PM
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Re: Hardest to easiest
[ QUOTE ]
So I have a question - when the first man on Mars is Chinese and not American, will it be because our rocket scientists spent so much time posting on poker forums about how hard their job was? [/ QUOTE ] Well, I'm not saying how hard my job is. I personally don't think it's all that terribly difficult. Plus, we're going to beat the Chinese (and I might soon - next year probably - be working on the next vehicle in the evolution to doing it for us). Nevermind my penchant for procrastination.
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#55
03-18-2005, 06:26 PM
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It ain\'t football
Not fair to declare football to have to be NFL but allow for any physicist. Consider there are around 2,000 pro football players. There are nowhere near that many non-hack physicists. Plus maybe 1 in 100 people could play pro football. Can that many do high-level physics research? Perhaps.
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#56
03-18-2005, 07:07 PM
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Re: It ain\'t football
[ QUOTE ]
Not fair to declare football to have to be NFL but allow for any physicist. Consider there are around 2,000 pro football players. There are nowhere near that many non-hack physicists. Plus maybe 1 in 100 people could play pro football. Can that many do high-level physics research? Perhaps. [/ QUOTE ] Just to be clear, the original post on kuro5hin said to rate the professions "In terms of overall skill as a professional. That is to say, were you born a perfectly average human, which would be hardest to easiest." By "skill as a professional" I took the question to mean "someone practicing this skill as a professional," which in the US means you're basically playing in the NFL. My numbers from the AIP for physicists were, I think, also just for the US. I agree that this is a much, much higher bar as a percentage of people who've played football than professional physicist is as a percentage of people who have done physics. But it's the only bar there is: there just aren't that many people who can really be called "professional" football players, but there are many people who try. There are far, far more people who can reasonably be called "professional" physicists in the US. If the question had instead asked someone to rank these subjects in order of how hard it would be for the average person to become part of the top 5% of the populace in that subject, my answers would be quite different. The point is that the top x% of physicists can reasonably be called professionals, and the top y% of football players can reasonably be called professionals. Y is much smaller than x: there are far more physics jobs, and (probably) far fewer people who are really aiming for one of those jobs. As I said in the original post, another way of equalizing the standard is to make the bar for physicists something like "faculty at a good school," or even just "PhD from a very good school," because those are also things that many people would probably be incapable of. But getting one of the ~1200 physics PhDs conferred every single year is a much lower bar than this, and continuing to be employed as a "professional" physicist isn't vastly harder. cheers, mn
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#58
03-18-2005, 07:24 PM
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Re: Hardest to easiest
[ QUOTE ]
having seen some of the work the kids do around here, i'd be very suprised if getting an undergrad degree in physics weren't completely unachievable for a gigantic proportion of the population. i was good at math/physics in high school and consider myself fairly intelligent, and i have serious doubts as to whether or not i'd be able to pass any of the higher-level physics courses here on my first try. [/ QUOTE ] Unless you're going to a pretty difficult school, I submit to you that this is probably not the case. If your program actually is quite tough, then I agree with you, but the point is that the original question didn't exclude people who went to very easy schools and got mediocre PhDs and then mediocre physics jobs afterwards. There are lots of people like this. Put another way, I've met plenty of people who are "professional physicists" (have a PhD, and work in physics now) but who probably wouldn't have been able to hack the undergrad physics curriculum at one of the 5 or so most difficult places. I'm not going to name names here or anything, but there are institutions (not necessarily universities) that have hired some awfully average people; there is simply no way some of these people could have survived my undergrad coursework, or that at a few other places. It's also possible that I'm completely underestimating how difficult physics is for the average person. Pretty much by definition (i.e., since I work in the field), I'm one of the people who found it straightforward; maybe a pro football player would also find it unfathomable that the average person couldn't be trained to compete at a professional level. I sort of doubt it, though. later, mn
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#59
03-18-2005, 07:35 PM
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Re: Hardest to easiest
[ QUOTE ]
Unless you're going to a pretty difficult school, I submit to you that this is probably not the case. If your program actually is quite tough, then I agree with you, but the point is that the original question didn't exclude people who went to very easy schools and got mediocre PhDs and then mediocre physics jobs afterwards. There are lots of people like this. Put another way, I've met plenty of people who are "professional physicists" (have a PhD, and work in physics now) but who probably wouldn't have been able to hack the undergrad physics curriculum at one of the 5 or so most difficult places. [/ QUOTE ] i'm at princeton, enrolled in the engineering school - do the fundamentals of physics really change that much from program to program? and how many people from mediocre departments actually manage to get accepted into phd programs?
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