The Life of a Physicist
The study of physics is one of the most difficult studies you could choose to spend your life studying. It is known that from the time you are an undergraduate, studying to become a physicist is very difficult and time consuming. And the atmosphere in which you work and the way in which the field is constructed makes it very difficult. When you are an undergrad, you are expected to read the textbooks and understand the material as if it were true, you cant have the flexibility to challenge these discussions or have the imagination or creativity to have your own ideas. You are expected to do these practice problems to understand the equations that the physics greats from before had discovered. You will not questions these ideas or challenge your professors on these topics as stated in Traweek’s book Beamtimes and Lifetimes,“The students learn from textbooks whose interpretation of physics is not to be challenged; in fact, it is not to be seen as interpretation,” (Traweek 75). This is an environment that is very controlling of what you need to do and how you need to think, yet, if you want to become a physicist, this is the only way to get there, and this is only the first step of a long journey ahead.
You then have to go through grad school, in which your life becomes the physics that you are studying, you have to eat, sleep, and breathe you studies. This becomes a controlling environment, taking advantage of the young students who are looking to earn their PhD and using them to do the grunt work in the labs at every hour of the day. Becoming a Postdoc is not much easier and is said to be a difficult transition for most. This is an anxious time for these physicists because they are given much more freedom in the labs and are meant to be much more independent with their work. This is also a time when they have to form bonds with other physicists in order to know if they will work in theories or in communities. When you finally become the group leader, you have all the power and control of your lab that you had worked for and everyone answers to you. You have the ability to control those who work underneath you and be the authority figure.
This entire process of becoming a physicist is very controlling and strict, making you work many hard, grueling years, just to get to where you want to end up. This environment can be compared to white supremacy culture, especially the ways that these practices show up in the workplace. They take many years of your life, controlling you at every step along the way to let you finally get to do what you were working toward all along. They don’t allow you to have your own thoughts or ideas until you prove yourself after years of work. They suppress you, letting time be your limit for when you can move up in the ranks and not your skills or work ethic. These ideas are also expressed in Cole’s The Uncle of the Atom Bomb. He describes the many ranks within the government group that was in charge of the Manhattan Project and how they made all the decisions, sometimes without all the correct information. Those who made the decisions often wouldn’t listen to other experts with other points of view to try and make more education decisions. They discuss this when they describe how many physicists on the project wanted to give the Japanese other options rather than dropping these bombs on them, killing many innocent people with no warning. “Not that it would have made much difference; those making such critical decisions had little use for the views of most physicists,” (Cole 63).
There are many groups within our society that use many of these white supremacy culture methods of running their programs. These are just a couple examples that were outlines in these articles over the life of these physicists. We as a society need to be more open minded and understanding of other perspectives in order to make better decisions and to have better run businesses and organizations. When people work together and use their ideas, we are much more successful. If we can make these changes as a society, we might be able to accomplish more than we ever thought we could.
Cole, K. C. (2012). Something incredibly wonderful happens Frank Oppenheimer and his astonishing Exploratorium. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Traweek, S. (1992). Beamtimes and lifetimes: The world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
