I left academia yesterday

Why I left

Yesterday I handed in my resignation letter for my Postdoctoral Scholar position at one of the University of Californias, where I worked on quantum gravity.¹ Today, I am high on some opioid they gave me after I came out of general anesthesia from some procedure I had to undergo. But I digress (but do cut me a nice chunk of slack if this text has painkiller-haze smeared over it).

Sadness is unavoidable when leaving behind the diamond-like radiant beauties of theoretical physics. So is it when departing a group of preposterously good collaborators, colleagues, and mentors. But most of all I feel relief and excitement. I have started to realize that the most natural system for organizing my life is a classification of what beauties I am pursuing at any given time, and new beauties and mysteries have been attracting my gaze for a while. Delicacies that are less Platonic, more emergent and complex. But I will miss the green-blue electromagnetic fields, the brown non-linearity of gravity, and the intense redness of quantum chromodynamics (synesthesia).²

My prospects for securing a professorship were never glittering, given that I work in a field brimming with literal child prodigies (and def not brimming with permanent jobs). I don’t want to drag my wife from city to city either, chasing one academic temporary position after another. And—not irrelevant to my decision—the future looks ominous for universities, due to a mix of good and spectacularly idiotic reasons. Many emanate from politics (from both sides of the aisle, but not in even amounts), some have arisen from gradual sclerosis, and some have been caused by bad emergent cultural phenomena in the academy and culture at large. The universities need to become more elitist and risk-taking, yet at the same time we need to place less emphasis on university degrees and recognize that people can be amazing even if they decided not to go to a university. Like, fuck yeah, be amazing at your craft. The enshittification of the objects around us must be addressed by proud craftsmen investing their pride and integrity in making good things, encouraged by a broader cultural disdain for all the junk we’re selling and buying these days.³ Also, let’s figure out what the cathedrals of our age are gonna be. Let’s up our ambition on the Sacred, dialing down the self-flagellation of western culture. Let’s strive for Chartres and produce the masons, master builders, and religious ideas that we need. But oh, I digress again.

I am quite proud of some of the 15 or so papers I’ve published.⁴ Lovely theorems proven, interesting patterns found. I proved a theorem bounding how quickly quantum entanglement can grow in certain quantum field theories, I showed how there is evidence for a really fascinating new exotic phase of matter, and I contributed to new insights and results on the cosmic censorship conjecture—Roger Penrose’s conjecture that singularities must be hidden inside black holes.

Next I am going to San Francisco. A couple of friends from my time at MIT started a company recently, and they want me onboard. They build AI systems to automate steps of the scientific research process, and they already have a badass product. No gimmicks, professional scientists are paying for it—more by the day. I will still use my physics skills there, and I genuinely believe I will have much bigger leverage on science with them. The salary bump doesn’t hurt either: I have my eyes on a realistic-to-buy-but-not-cheap painting by a painter I selfishly won’t tell you about yet, in case you snatch the work before me. Anyway, I am bullish on human+AI collaborations for science, and I’m going to bet my time on it. I like the pragmatic nature of it too. Either the tools we build are good enough that researchers and organizations want to spend their hard-earned money on it, or we go out of business. I hope we don’t, but if we do, it hopefully was for the honest reason that we weren’t worthy enough craftsmen.

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1. I worked on the AdS/CFT correspondence.

2. Electric fields are green, magnetic fields are blue. Electromagnetic waves oscillate between electric and magnetic, so they swing between green and blue. Individual photons are gray with a shade of blue, and gravitons are transparent. Quarks are red, gluons are a shining orange. W bosons are yellow, Z bosons are gray-black. Black holes are black, but their exteriors are brown. Nothing is purple. Plenty of music is purple though. Especially In the Nightside Eclipse by Emperor.

3. Like, wow, the amount of effort you have to go to to find clothes with quality fabrics and quality construction. Price is an awful predictor of this.

4. A few of them are not good at all.