If I hadn’t left physics, I’d have had to make up an awful lot of ground publishing high-impact papers as a postdoc to make up for my lackluster graduate school record if I wanted a decent shot at a faculty job someday. I was completely burned out and I knew it. I’d had my chance to attempt greatness in physics, and I did not rise to the occasion. I felt some loss upon leaving, but I knew it was the right thing to do (even if I have my doubts from time to time now).

The people I have known when they were students who have succeeded in physics at R1-type faculty positions aren’t all weird, I would say, so much as extremely focused. Physics is their mission and dictates their priorities. And I think that many of them were born that way. They couldn’t help it; physics chose them. As opposed to me, who deliberately tried to make myself a physicist.

The star student in my research group was someone who ground his own lenses for the astronomy club’s telescope in his spare time. And he wasn’t this super-nerd, either–he was very personable, intense but personable. He had a longtime girlfriend who was outside of physics, and they got married, though she left him a year later. But anyway, J. was someone who just naturally tinkered, all the way through childhood. He told me once about when his parents bought a PC when he was twelve. The disk drive didn’t work properly, so unlike normal people who would pack the computer back up and bring it to the store for an exchange, he started rigging it up to the stereo instead to find a workaround. Very resourceful, and very creative. The U of C was the only school that admitted him as an undergraduate, and the only one that admitted him as a graduate student, because his talent didn’t reveal itself on a transcript.

J. was also reinventing physics discoveries on his own as an undergraduate while not bothering to do problems that didn’t interest him–he once described himself as a random grade generator for his undergrad physics courses, getting everything from a c- to an A+ at one time or another. But you see, his talents blossomed in the lab.

I would say that physics picked J. I think he’s intense because he can’t help it–it’s just who he is. Whereas I was someone who was a very good student and got as far as I did through determination. But I wasn’t happy because I think I was really a closeted artist/writer. (The message I got from my mother, though, was to be technical because those were the good jobs. I just took it a little too far.)

My point? I think great problems are self-selecting. I could have tried to work on a great problem–and for a while, I did, but got stuck on other details–but the demands of that made me unhappy in other ways, so I stopped. I wasn’t cut out to work on great physics problems. I liked the physics, but I liked other things too that I didn’t want to cut out of my life. But I think the people who do work on great problems are doing what feels right to them. Something that might feel like a sacrifice to me–neglecting my husband–might not feel like a sacrifice to the right person. And that is why the role models might be weird. Physics didn’t make them weird–I think that they were probably sort of weird to begin with, and that gave them a selective advantage in this demanding career. Survival of the most obsessed!

I’m hoping that my weirdness will help me in either art or writing, myself.

However, there is something to the idea of aspiring to have great ideas and do great work that appeals to me. I think this is what any person working in a creative field wants to do when they create– artists, musicians, and writers as well as scientists. Striving for creativity and originality makes sense, not just for the obsessive, self-absorbed, marriage-destroying types, but for anyone who wants to do something creative.

So what about good jobs that leave you time to have a life? Sounds good to me, if the job is interesting. Or maybe even if it’s not– I have a friend who edits informational brochures on kidney disease all day. This way he conserves his energy for spending time with his wife and writing fiction. That’s not a choice I would make, though– I like being able to spend my day working on problems I find interesting.

Your question remains, though– is it possible to succeed in science without getting, um, weird? I have to agree, the role models out there are not all good.

I was also spooked by some failed marriages that happened right around the time I was winding up in graduate school. I hadn’t been very happy for a while anyway, but I figured that if physics is a field that forces people to make these choices, then I’d rather have my husband than physics.

I sort of think that the people who are great not only work hard, but can’t help being obsessed with what they’re working on. Clearly there’s a commitment to hard work, but these people gotta really believe that it’s worth it to focus on the great problem to the exclusion of everything else.

And that’s another bone that a friend of mine who got her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering (now working in the field of medical devices) has to pick with physics and the attitudes there: this cult of greatness. I bought into it, too, don’t get me wrong. But she thinks it’s messed up that physics is so competitive and focused in greatness. What’s so wrong, she says, with just getting a good job that allows you to do something interesting and have a life, too?