Assuming that the questions posed by Steve Benka in “The Entangled Dance of Physics” ( Physics Today, December 2006, page 51) are not meant to be merely rhetorical, I would like to answer some of them. The questions suggest that the answers might reveal a homogeneous group of nonacademic physicists. My answers, however, constitute a sample of one and should be interpreted as such.
I finished my PhD in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. After a couple of postdoctoral assignments, in 1988 I started working in the engineering group of Beckman Instruments Inc in Palo Alto, California. Officially, my title is now something like “senior staff advanced research scientist,” but I refer to myself as “senior staff physicist” on all correspondence and on my business card. So, in answer to the question “Do physicists [outside academia] have an inferiority complex or the opposite?” I would say I am very proud to be a physicist and consider that a core part of my identity, both personal and professional. To the question “Have they become apathetic to or ashamed of their origins?” my answer is emphatically no. I cannot conceive of any physicist becoming apathetic about such a grand science and profession. I always get a sense of thrill when my new issue of Physics Today arrives in the mail.
“Have [nonacademic physicists] moved on to heights of discovery in new realms that academics can only dream of?” Hardly! Instead, I have been very busy importing into my organization some well-established engineering tools and technologies that have been developed over decades by the engineering community, especially its aerospace engineering segment. It's a blast! Such powerful tools as you can hardly imagine. But whereas an engineer might see the tools only in terms of their utility, as a physicist I see them as marvelous and complex creations that stem from the entanglements described in the article.
Benka comments that “many who live there [in nonacademia] ply their trade invisibly; we don't know how to see them.” I agree, but it's not clear to me to what extent—if at all—the physics community suffers on account of that invisibility. I can say that physics graduate students who approach graduation with the idea that anything else but an academic career is tantamount to failure are badly misinformed. The invisibility of nonacademic physicists can and should be reduced by physics departments inviting us to departmental colloquia for a description of our work. Graduate students should get entangled with nonacademic physicists as early as possible.
Benka's article resonated with me. It captures everything I love about physics, the physics community, and what Victor Weisskopf called “the privilege of being a physicist.”
