Generally speaking, I find that no calculation is a total waste. You got the practice, for a start…. Further, even if the idea that you were working on did not work out and you got a null result, or just no result at all, document your computation in a notebook so that you can reconstruct it later and save it. Chances are it might well feed into something else later on in your career.

Good luck.

-cvj

Popularization of physics often tries to avoid discussion of calculations and to focus on the ideas. It’s nice that you’ve put the facts straight in this post.

That sounds ridiculous but nobody did ever bother to give me such reassuring tips. I come from a country where there is a concrete wall that separates students from professors and research workers.

Regards,

SP

Suppose you get a idea, and you do some checks on it, and find that it does not work in the original great way, that you thought. However it might still be mildly interesting. But to type it up as a paper you still need to do a lot of calculations — so is it worth the effort of doing this extra work and getting it published? Or should you start working on something else? What if you are a graduate student and the checks that you did on it took some time?

Cheers,

-cvj

When you’re writing a paper, you don’t want this to happen to you. Either the reviewers will catch it (rather embarrassing) or they won’t, but one of the journal readers will (horribly embarrassing). So yeah, you do spend a lot of time checking the details.

Did not mean to be overly glib about the ideas business, but there is some truth to what I said about breakfast and so forth, but it does take a while to get to that stage. It comes from being around long enough to learn enough bits of the field to see how things connect to each other and so forth. There comes a point then where if someone tells you that they have uncovered fact A about a given system, a whole host of things to do (some of them simple but important extensions along the lines of what Tommy was saying, but others more involved) occur to you immediately. Many of them are good ideas, and really good things to explore. The trick is being able to bring computational concrete to those ideas (not always possible), and/or having the skill and insight to know which of them are worth exploring. A good advisor is someone who can help you navigate this sort of minefield of ideas. She will show you how to start with small computations, and build up to huge really involved ones that can take months in some cases… all glued together with a guiding intuition about what the central idea is. I guess the point is really to find good balance between ideas and computation…. each guides the other. It takes experience to get the balance.

All the best with the new stage of your career! It is a fun time…!

Best,

-cvj

Random bit of advice for someone just starting out. It helps to have a good advisor of course, talking with him and especially postdocs working on things you are interested in. They often have a bit more perspective on things and can tell you about things people find interesting currently. This can be done in a casual way, say over lunch or after work beers.

Another thing that is good when first starting out is to take a recent paper you find interesting and try to think of a way to extend it, just a little bit. Maybe they didn’t include charge. Maybe they only worked something out for a certain gauge group. It seems trivial, but its a good place to start (especially for someone new) and you’ll often find a lot of interesting stuff arises as you proceed. I recall getting two whole papers out of literally trying to add rotation to someone else’s work early in my graduate career.

Actually, I’m a first year Physics student so that I know how time-consuming calculations can be.
In order not to turn into a mere “machine for turning coffee into equations” I also toy with ideas.
Yet when checking on the arXiv it always happen that someone came before and tamed that idea ; I find this most depressing.

So I was surprised when you wrote that “anyone in [your] field ought to be able to think of at least six of them before breakfast”.
I guess it’s due to my lack of knowledge and I’m working hard to catch up with the field.
I’ll hurry and go through your book, then. (I’ve already read the first part: you did a great job !)

Cheers,
IP

I also spend a lot of time checking or redoing many of my calculations. When you get a result you wanted there’s a temptation to simply declare the calculation correct which is quite dangerous. I often force myself to take out some fresh scrap paper and redo the whole thing just to check. That’s also what good collaborators are for.