by Brian Dodson

Created on: January 06, 2010

There was a time when a student with a special aptitude in physics would automatically be on the track to a professorship at some university.  Between the development of the atomic bomb during and after World War II, the invention of semiconductor electronics in 1947, and the Cold War explosion in remote sensing technologies, the demand for trained physicists was so enormous that most of the best physicists were utilized to produce more physicists.  In the process, of course, an enormous amount of basic research was funded and carried out at universities.  (A work force of motivated and talented graduate students and postgraduate assistants can accomplish an enormous amount of research with minimal supervision!)  The newly cloaked PhDs went out into the world, were snatched up by the best government and commercial research laboratories, and given nearly unfettered license to poke into whatever interesting pocket of physical ignorance they fancied.

This nice picture of a dynamic and expanding field of study started to fail as the Soviet Union fell.  Research and development in nuclear physics were dramatically reduced as the quest for Mutual Assured Destruction became academic, and nuclear power plants became active foci for environmental concerns.  In microelectronics, most of the basic physics underlying the field had been elucidated, so that most of the development effort in the field switched from basic research to device and process engineering.  Interesting work, but not the physics research for which physicists had trained. 

In short, although an active university physics professor might graduate a PhD each year over a 30 year career, in recent times no more than one or two is likely to follow a career-long basic research path.  Physicists nowadays still have a unique set of problem solving skills, and are applying them on a vastly wider stage.  Among these skills are a trained natural ability to express phenomena in useful and predictive mathematical models, a long attention span for problems, and most important, a real but limited respect for the time-tested ideas of the past. 

Today, most new physics PhDs wind up in what is essentially an engineering path, applying existing knowledge in new ways to accomplish marvels such as ¼ inch thick high definition televisions, supercomputers on a chip, brilliant weapons of various types, global communications on an unprecedented scale, and a wide range

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