"I want you to be a Fermi.....". I have already mentioned Kinwah's ( my supervisor) propensity towards mentoring me, almost to the exclusion to actually supervising me on my project. This Monday, in our meeting, again we spent the first hour or so sorting out my applications for my summer job.

As a slight aside, if all goes well, I'll be insanely busy this coming summer. I'm applying for a bursary to do research with my supervisors in MSSL in Surrey (about 40 minutes outside London), officially for 8 weeks. In addition to that, I'm applying to do an internship in the Anglo-Australian Observatory outside Sydney, and if I get that I'll probably be spending nights playing with big big BIG telescopes. If I get offers for both, I'll take both on. This lasts 10 weeks. 10 + 8 = 18..... I have maybe 3 1/2 months of summer vacation at most, so how would I make it work. Fortunately, the bursary for the research at MSSL is provided for by a organisation called Nuffield Foundation, but my supervisors will (obviously) be supervising me for the research, and they'll be pretty flexible about timing so long as I get things done.

Anyway back to Kinwah's latest comments/advice to me. His current PhD student, Steven, has gotten himself a post-doc position in Stanford U., and so he told me that Steven could probably help put in a good word for me if I wanted to apply to Stanford for a PhD. Steven is going to be continuing as an X-ray astronomer, so if he's going to be any help to get me into Stanford, I would obviously have to go into X-ray astronomy as well. I do get the vague feeling that Kinwah is trying to push me into his field....

He also said that I remind him of Roberto, his second PhD student who is now on a fellowship at Harvard, in that I am more of an intuitive physicist rather than a purely theoretical type. However, if I were to get a strong theoretical grounding and work mainly as a phenomenologist or experimentalist (e.g. like Enrico Fermi), then he thinks I will be very good at that.

I've always regarded experimentalists as playing second fiddle to theorists, possibly because most of the famous physicists that laypeople hear of are theorists (Einstein, Bohr, Hawking). Also, experimentalists tend not to be able to have so much intellectual ownership of their work, as they tend to work in large groups, compared with theorists. Nevertheless, it's impossible to overestimate the importance of experimentalists....modern science is profoundly based on the experimental method, after all....

My youthful dreams of making an impact on the world a la Einstein and Feynmann, however, have been dispelled by reality. 99.999% of physicists make contributions which the layperson would have heard of, even if they win a Nobel prize (how many Nobel Physics laureates can the average person name off the top of their head?). Science is first and foremost about learning about nature, and the act of doing science should be the greatest reward any scientist can have. Anyone who expects greater rewards from science should look for another career.