RE: New life at the boundary of academia and the real world.
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Hey scienceblocks! It is nice to read from you again. Apologies for the delayed answer. I am less present during week-end time. You know, family and related matters... But here I am, finally, four days later!
It is interesting to read how you have evolved (or will soon be, more precisely). As a side note, I have always been curious on what is going on in the real world, which is something I don't really care with my field (I guess we can say that what I do is TLR -10 :D ). I therefore wish you good luck and hope you will have as much fun as with you PhD (congrats for the upcoming submission).
I hope to still read science blogs from you once in a while (I can imagine that what you will do next will be under some NDAs).
Cheers!
Totally get the weekend thing. I won't say particle physics is at TRL -10. I remeber in my college days, in a viva voice exam the external asked me to explain NMR. And I started from Spin of quarks and then took him to hydrogen atoms and structure of molecules. Now after 10 years NMR comes ro haunt me again, in a good way. It is a key tool for drug development. And many such tools have resulted from our understanding of the atoms. PET is another example. And who knows what else cool things we will see in future based on what you are publishing after smashing those atoms.
And yes, I will keep writing. In fact I was telling my friend the other day that I enjoy writing more than what I opted to pursue. So that is gonna stay. I also have to an itch to write about my thesis work. I guess one more week, till I submit, after that I will make a layman summary of it.
Okay. Please let me rephrase: "theoretical particle physics".
Building a better theory explaining how our universe works won't give any application short-term-wise. However, we train people, we provide them skills to solve hard problems, and innovation comes from the conception of our experiments (to limit myself to few examples). Therefore, there is an added value to the society. I would just not classify it in terms of TRL.
I am looking forward to read this! You can count on my comments and questions :)