This is a collection of observations I have made about myself over time regarding the effect of my professional habits (as a physicist) on my everyday thinking and actions. Basically, they are intellectual patterns that have transferred themselves into my practical life.
Quantify, quantify Physics deals a lot with what we can measure. So physicists tend to make, or ask for, measurements. During my graduate training as an experimentalist, I would have to measure things regularly (humidity and temperature in the lab, pressure inside my vacuum chamber, power emitted by lasers, current and voltage in circuits, flow rates through pipes, etc.).
This habit has transferred itself to real life. I was telling my doctor about the daily patterns in my blood pressure. She looked at me suspiciously and asked why I was measuring my blood pressure so often. My reply ('Because I can') did not seem to douse whatever suspicions she might have had about my mental state. But of course, such measurements are increasingly becoming passé now that we have smartphones doing this literally all the time.
As an extension of this habit, I order blood tests whenever I go to India, since they are cheap, the expert comes home to draw the blood, and the results are sent to me the same day electronically. So we can now track markers for liver, kidney, thyroid, etc. An Indian surgeon I know tells me his classmates who are now doctors in the USA and UK order CT scans whenever they come to India, as these tests are harder and more expensive to obtain in those countries.
Estimate, estimate Where we cannot quantify exactly, physics teaches us to make 'order-of-magnitude' estimates. These are very useful to obtain a general idea of the situation, especially to decide which effects are likely to dominate. (Some of the more esoteric ones, such as guessing the number of piano tuners in Chicago, are known as Fermi problems - where coming up with the estimate requires some deep/creative thinking).
But now the habit has become a reflex. So I find myself estimating all the time: the number of people in the mall; the average car velocity for a trip; the time it will take me to finish a book given the number and size of pages; the weight of the bag I am packing for a flight (to be checked against the meter later); the volume of liquid in a coffee cup, the number of effective months spent awake and working competently in an average human lifetime (hint: not that many).
Scale, scale In physics scales set by nature or other situations matter crucially. For example, what is fast and what is slow may be decided (in free space) by comparison of the moving object's speed to the speed of light. So physicists are in the habit for asking for the scale of comparison when claims of 'light' versus 'heavy' or 'long' versus 'short' are made, for example.
I find it very useful to carry this habit over to the arena of human experience. For example what some friend describes as 'cheap' might become 'expensive' when compared to my salary. What some colleague describes as an 'easy' problem might become 'very hard' when normalized by my intellect. What some acquaintance as 'cool' might be 'avoidable' when normalized by my personality.
But even physical comparisons can be quite illuminating. It is sobering to realize the difference between crashing into a lamppost while driving at 30 miles an hour (relative velocity 30mph) versus crashing into another car coming the other way also at 30 mph (relative velocity 60 mph). The total energy of collision is 4 times larger in the latter case.
Predict then Test Scientists (especially theoreticians) like to make predictions and then test to see if they are true. Since we live in an era in which life is changing before our very eyes (new electronic models every few months, viral videos every few weeks, new news practically every second), pre-empting the future almost becomes a necessity. The more of our predictions come true, the better our understanding of our system. The exercise is also fun as a kind of futurism.
Some trivial examples: For quite a while Google maps did not show the speed limit of the road on the navigator. It was not hard to predict this improvement would be made, and it was. There was a time when there were personnel sitting in booths to collect highway toll. It was not hard to predict that these jobs would be automated, and they were (recently, at least in New York state).
With the coming of AI, we can certainly make and test a lot of predictions. A prediction that I hope will come true: as soon as I tell my AI assistant my dates and locations of travel, it books the tickets, sends Ubers at the right times to the right places (where it tells me to go), books and directs me to hotels in case of flight delays, clears me with airport security and immigration, arranges for luggage checkin and tagging, and injects me with the right medicine so I can overcome jetlag dynamically and stay current in whatever time zone I am passing through. Ok, maybe not that last one.
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