My story with physics has been circuitous. If it resonates with even one student, then I think it’s worth sharing.

Louis Slotin and the demon core

Louis Slotin was a Canadian scientist in World War II. I learned about him at age eight, when I saw a dramatization of the Manhattan Project on CBC called Race for the Bomb. Of all the sophisticated topics featured in this mini-series (not for eight-year-olds), it was Slotin’s bizarre death that awoke me to physics.

Here’s how I remember the scene: Dr. Slotin was in the lab handling two blocks of metal no bigger than an orange. Danger was not at all apparent to me or anyone in the scene. He unintentionally put the two blocks together for a few seconds, panic ensued in the room, and he immediately separated them. Though all in the room seemed unchanged, everyone knew that this young man now only had a few days left to live. In the next scene, merely days later, Slotin had aged by about fifty years, now blanketed and in a wheel-chair, frail and whithered with but a few wisps of hair clinging to his pale head.

How could this be real? Where did the energy come from within these inanimate lumps of metal? And what’s up with them joining? But this was not fiction: Slotin tragically died from radiation poisoning one week after his incident in 1946 at the age of 35. The equations and theoretical musings of the distinguished gentlemen in black-and-white portraits suddenly became very real to me. I was compelled that physics lets us glimpse deeply into nature.

Donna Strickland’s advice to undergrads

Donna Strickland is a Canadian scientist who in 2018 won the Nobel Prize in Physics. She was invited the following year to give the Loeb lectures at Harvard while I was there also finishing my postdoctoral research. Her response to a request for general advice by a college student at the end of her lectures resonated with me and my journey…

I was encouraged to major in engineering for practical reasons: it’s like physics but with better job prospects, I was told. Cape Breton University, the college where my father taught economics, was tiny and had but one professor of physics! I compromised on my interests and went along, unaware how a finish-what-you-start attitude and the sunken cost fallacy can inhibit introspection and asking for advice. It was not a total bore—I tacked on a B.Sc. in math—but engineering did not stimulate the truth-seeking part of me. I earned my Ph.D. from Carleton University and worked in medical imaging technology and electrophysiology experiments on the functional organization of visual cortex. These projects are worthy causes for sure, but I eventually had to concede them as being unfulfilling for me.

…back to Professor Strickland. Her advice to the college student sums up what I have learned. She offered a vignette about her grad school days when other students were debating what topic to specialize in. She followed her passion, but others were considering her topic for its broad career prospects. “If it’s not the subject that you truly care about”, she recounts, “then you shouldn’t do it.” Addressing us, she said, “Don’t compromise on what you’re passionate about. If you ignore this advice and do something else for any other reason, then you will eventually come back to what brought you here in the first place.”

How true that is. Vocations are not up for compromise. When a student is drawn to academia to study a subject as an end in itself, that feeling should be unsparingly nourished. When in doubt of your path, seek advice from all sides and know that “losing” a year to refocus is OK and might even save the work of a lifetime.