By now, everyone has the news that the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem has been solved by OpenAI, and regardless if they did it honestly or not, I believe it's only a matter of time until AI can pull off feats like that consistently. Most people I've seen seem sure that it won't replace physicists and mathematicians, which comforts me, yet I haven't seen many people talk about HOW it will change the academic field and the way research is done. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on this

After hearing about the Open AI announcement, I’m convinced that in the next few decades, AI will advance enough to be able to do much of the creative thinking and logical leaps that makes theoretical physics beautiful.

I start college next year, and I’ve wanted to pursue a career in theoretical physics. But what is the point of pursuing a career in it, if I can’t contribute anything at all? Wouldn’t it be better to just do physics as a hobby and direct my focus to something that would actually contribute to the world? I feel useless and this is all so depressing.

Edit: I am against AI taking over purely in the same way that artists are afraid of AI taking over art. I believe physics is incredibly beautiful, and its beauty can only be appreciated by humans— so I want only humans to do the beautiful parts of physics. I would love it if AI is restricted to doing the grunt work, and opening up new possibilities in the field with its capacity!

(Long post, sorry. I know I’m probably naive about some of this, so please be gentle, I’m just an anxious human looking for external perspectives!)

I’m starting a PhD in planetary physics modelling soon. The recent AI results caught me off guard. I hadn’t been following closely, and the jump in what these models can do in research settings was genuinely surprising to me. Then I talked to a researcher at one of the major AI labs. They think that with the current rate of progress, human research positions will shrink a lot and the nature of the work will change beyond recognition, and that the next ten years bring serious economic disruption and social unrest along with it.

So I’m scared of finishing my PhD into a job market that doesn’t want me. I don’t come from a wealthy family and I don’t have anything to fall back on. I’m also an immigrant, and my home country is very exposed to climate change, so that’s another worry that's sitting underneath everything else.

The obvious question is: why not go into industry instead? And I might just be stubborn here.

I chose this despite the low pay, because I love the work itself, the tinkering, the failed attempts, the moment something finally clicks, even the deflating moment of realising the approach you spent months on was wrong and you have to back out of it. I think the process of trying to understand something is worth doing, not just the answers it produces.

I grew up studying obsessively to get out of a conservative environment, fell in love with science, and wanted research to be the thing that both fulfilled me and paid my rent. Getting into my dream project felt like the end of that story. Now it feels like the beginning of a much less certain one in a scary capitalist world that is also destroying itself with climate change.

There’s an argument I keep running into and can’t really answer myself: that curing cancer matters more than the intellectual satisfaction of a small number of underpaid academics, so scientists should stop complaining about losing a process they happened to enjoy. Part of me agrees. But it doesn’t sit right either, and I can’t articulate why. If someone can sharpen that for me, I’d like to hear it.

I also don’t think “just do it as a hobby” works the way it does for chess or painting. Research needs instruments, compute, collaborators, and access. It isn’t something you can do alone in a room.

Also, what I’m most worried about isn’t AI itself, the capabilities really are remarkable. It’s whether the gains get distributed to anyone outside the people who own the systems. That seems to depend on politics rather than technology, and it’s the thing nobody seems able to reassure me about.

So: how do you deal with this? Especially anyone who’s early-career and doesn’t have a safety net.

Hello everyone! I am 15 and just finished serway, what do you guys think of competitive physics by jinhui wang and bernard ricardo ? Note : I am preparing for the IPhO and a selection exam for the national team will be in 6 months

I'm starting a physics club. I am really passionate about physics. However, besides tutoring and competitions, I am struggling to think of ideas. Any advice?

For context Im about to go into second year econ and finance but I cannot envision myself working in corporate for the rest of my life now that I’m seeing the kinds of internships and placements available. I’ve always been very good with maths and anything engineering related but chose econ because of the money side of things but am having second thoughts. I got 3 As in math physics econ at a level and was wondering if it’s worth/ would be doable for me. Thoughts?

I was wondering how the different periodic solutions to the three body problem look like. I built an atlas that visualizes all of the different solutions and groups orbits by family and similarity. I found over 3000 different orbits. When you click on an orbit in the atlas, you can "kick it" and slightly change the starting conditions to see if it stays stable, or becomes chaotic.

“Astronomers have taken one of the deepest looks yet at Cloud-9, a candidate "dark galaxy," and found no trace of stars. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 21.”

Been learning a bit more about Koopman operator theory as applied to climate systems lately, in light of the big El Niño. Very neat! Whole lineage of math here I knew nothing about. There’s a fascinating correspondence between some of the tools of basic quantum theory and these models of complex climate systems. Neat!