Python is the big one, all of the aforementioned chemists are either intermediate or advanced in that. The runner-up seems to be Julia, which I personally have no experience with. The big guys are Fortran and C++. I prefer C for tasks of this nature, but I also shill Scheme so don't listen to my opinions on programming languages.
Best of luck on your computational chemistry endeavours!
My entire life is based around the academic route. I fell in love with a girl whose great desire in life was to settle securely in one place and have a family. To have a 9-5 job where she could spend the rest of the time in leisure with the person she loves, who presumably would also have a more laidback career. This is the opposite of the life of an academic. Stress, poor schedules and constant intense work and study. A professor who I deeply respect worked from 6AM to 11PM, 6 days a week for most of his post-doctoral years. I personally love the intensity of an academic life and working at breakneck pace is something I deeply enjoy.
Recently, I chose my scientific career over her. I suppose that I will be wondering my entire life whether I made the right choice.
That's it, I suppose. I can't really think of anything else.
Unfortunately, those who like statistical mechanics seem few and far between. :(
Or more specifically, how do you balane your life as a knowledge based worker when there's so much to learn and so little time to do it all?I am a physicist who specialised in molecular simulation. To be excellent at my work, I need to have a strong understanding of theory and compututation. For theory, I need to master classical mechanics, statistical physics and have a strong general grasp on...
Make no mistake: these chemicals are not to be trifled with. People with underlying mental health issues - the poeple who would be most interested in using psychedelics - are at heavy risk of exacerbating their illnesses. Even outside of those special cases, I've seen normal people become heavily affected by bad trips. I simply don't think that there is enough scientific literature on the adverse effects of psychedelics. I also do not like the heavy focus on the "spiritual" aspects that these drugs are believed to confer: are you really transcending, or are you just so heavily intoxicated that you believe you are and no longer have the rational capabilities to convince yourself otherwise?
If I can end on just a little anecdote myself, I personally believe that heavy psychedelic use is especially counterproductive to technical/knowledge-based work. I did barely any work during the year that I was experimenting with these drugs. I was so content with my life as it was that I simply didn't feel the urge to exert myself. I was becoming soft, more predisposed to magical thinking. I believed that psychedelics had revealed unto me truths about how society should be run, how life should be and the true nature of mathematics. But I didn't know a damn thing! I just lost the inclination to actually analyse my ideas (or notions, because they barely qualified as ideas), instead being content to just accept them as they were. After a long stretch of abstinence from these drugs, I realised how worthless most of these notions actually were. I also deeply regretted the amount of time I spent taking these notions seriously, as well as the amount of time I had wasted in thinking that I had actually been experiencing any spiritual truths.
A grand aim of soft matter physicists is to be able to describe biology in the quantitative language of physics. However, this is hard: biology is ridiculously complicated. However, as mentioned, we're slowly but surely making consistent progress. Advanced molecular simulation combined with machine learning appears to be an incredibly powerful approach that an entire generation of PhD students have begun to master. This has the add on effect in that it becomes easier to build theories if you have precise numerical undestanding of the physical system you're trying to study: something that simulation provides that traditional experiment doesn't.
Let's get onto the sci-fi. Imagine now that it's the 2050s and we've gotten to a point where the complexity of biology is manageable. Not fully solved: that's not going to happen any time soon. But manageable. At this point we can harness microbiology as an engineering tool. Viruses especially become active materials for construction: this has actually already happened [1], but in an extremely rudimentary way. Viruses are essentially spontaneously self-assembling molecular machines: even having a vague understanding of how they can be engineered promises a nanotechnology revolution. And that's just viruses. Imagine the other players of biology being actively used as tools for humanity: where does that even end?
We're taking our first teeny-tiny steps towards actually developing an understanding of biology in the same way we've developed an undestanding of electronics. We can't do it in the same way because the challenges are so much more tremendous, but we're honestly getting there. Ordinary lives won't so much as be changed for the better - rather, the meaning of "ordinary" life will be changed entirely.
[1] Fischlechner, M. and Donath, E. (2007), Viruses as Building Blocks for Materials and Devices.
People are well aware of the glamorous fields of physics: cosmology and particle physics. These are the disciplines that concern the frontiers of the very large and the very small respectively. I don't care so much about those. The frontier that I'm most interested in is the most abstract one: complexity. Physics has traditionally tackled problems that were either simple or could be made simple. Progress was made after the 1980s with the rise of solid state physics and associated attitudes towards emergence, but now? With the advent of statistical learning, advances in nonlinear dynamics and so on? Physicists are starting to tackle some insanely complex systems. Not to mention of course that computers are getting more powerful with time as per Moore's law, so simulations are really coming into their own as useful scientific approaches. Imagine the computational physicist of the 2050s, imagine the tools that she might have at hand to solve problems like the physics of life, or perhaps the phase diagrams of extremely heterogenous materials, or so on...
I can't help but be extremely excited! Here's to hoping that humanity makes it that far. :)
The change I've experienced throughout my PhD (that is, becoming a confident researcher with at least some depth to his ideas) has probably been more intense and almost certainly more long-lasting than my psychedelic experiences. Nurturing an uncomfortable familiarity with the immense limits of my knowledge, as well as regularly pushing myself to exhaustion in order to overcome those limits - inch by milimiter by angstrom - has completely transformed me as a person.
If anything psychedelics had the effect of making me believe that I had become enlightened to various true-natures-of-everything whilst providing me very little concrete understanding as to why this was the case. Much of the personal change that followed my experiences were less due to the substances and more due to my own desire for those experiences to mean something in the long run. Psychs are great and I'd recommend it wholeheartedly for those who have the courage (note: that's not to say that the classical psychedelics are dangerous - they're only dangerous for people who are scared of them). It is my opinion that one should not start believing that these things anything more than chemicals that make you feel a certain way, or help you along the path to doing so.
Honestly, I'm only doing it because it's a nice way of wasting time whilst convincing myself that I'm not wasting time!
My dad still believes that the Sun makes the "Om" sound after seeing a post by some kind of Hindu nationalist on Twitter. I have told him many times, in the kindest way I can, that it's a load of rubbish. He still doesn't really believe me, mostly because the idea of the Sun making that sound is a pleasant idea that agrees with his world view.
Send this article to a hundred people and a lowball of seventy will take it as fact. Of that seventy, there will be a fraction who will believe it - or rather, internalise the notion of it - even despite being told that it is false.
In all fairness it's also very likely that I'm a just a nasty killjoy.
It took me eight years to break out of that mindset, but I'm now doing well. In fact, my job makes heavy use of the subject that I was most afraid of due to my high school experience: mathematics. The process of becoming confident in mathematical problem solving and working through my considerable personal mental hangups was a dreadful experience. Many or even most people do not break out from the hang-ups they learn during high school, especially with mathematics.
EI have nothing but animosity for the high school system and would welcome any change that makes it less prominent in the lives of teens and young adults. I'd say that a college module system like that which the OP describes is a vastly superior alternative. I think that intellectual life and social life should be separated as much as possible, which I believe is for the most part the default setting in most universities.
You're right, though. I started playing chess to improve my concentration as a teenager, mostly for the purpose of improving my ability to focus on math. Then I realised that I got better at concentrating at math by... doing math problems instead of wasting my time playing chess.
According to Wikipedia: G. H. Hardy described proof by contradiction as "one of a mathematician's finest weapons", saying "It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."
You don't even need to proof theorems in algebraic geometry to start seeing the beauty and power of mathematical thinking. Get a mental arithmetic app on your phone and spend a few months routinely practising some sums. What first appears as a dry activity will soon become a highly personal exercise in creative reasoning, of finding the best way to represent and manipulate with numbers. For example, I solve arithmetic problems visually but my friend works best by reasoning aurally (I don't get it either, but seeing as he can multipy two 4 digit numbers in seconds it works for him). I'll say that learning to multiplying large numbers in my head has done more for me in terms of mental training than chess has!