To Zero at the Boundary: Thoughts at the End of a Physics Career.

I was always better at what physics was supposed to be than what it was. I had a decent sense for interesting problems, and I made progress on them. I was an enthusiastic teacher, perhaps an effective one. I expected the best from my students and was mostly not disappointed.

I lacked the ambition to pursue an ever-shrinking slice of the tenure-track pie. Oh, I could be plenty ambitious, but that channeled itself into goals like crafting the best possible explanation of the addition of quantum angular momentum. Intensely satisfying for me, potentially helpful for a few, yet useless for advancing a career.

And then, of course, I had to choose between living a lie that was killing me or outing myself as a member of a minority that an increasing number of governments want to see die.

There is, at long last, no point in pretending: There’s no funding, it’s literally unsafe for me to do the traveling and life-uprooting that are demanded of me to pursue the positions that aren’t even funded anymore and that I couldn’t accept in good conscience because the AI industry has rotted what few institutional morals we had. I made the case every way I could that AI companies are fundamentally hostile actors, and to a very good approximation, no one listened. I had thought everyone here was in the truth-pursuit business with me, but the prevailing sentiment is eagerness to use leaded gasoline to truck child laborers into sweatshops to paint asbestos with radium. Our profession is complicit in further enriching the worst people in the world and aiding them in their project of putting a meter on thought itself.

In every way, the flaws are now blown wide open. The principles that a decade ago told me not to enrich certain publishers are now pushing me out of the field entirely. The same deep neural need for understanding that led me to choose my research problems has finally done me in. Sorry, everybody, but I was a package deal. I would never have chosen the problems I did and worked so hard to get others to see the value in them if I were not, inside, starry-eyed.

Too many people are not who I had hoped they were. Too many institutions are not what we needed them to be.

I want to thank everyone who has taught me, be they professors, students or colleagues, and I want to apologize to anyone I treated with insufficient kindness and consideration.

If I have to choose between a chance at a physics career and a chance at life, the chance at life wins.

QUOD ERAT DECLARANDUM.