Ask away!
Andrew (he/him)
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I Am A PhD Astrophysicist American Expat in Ireland, A Lead Software Developer, and Training for a Marathon, Ask Me Anything!
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Top comments (22)
How many miles do you run each day, and how do you find the time? :)
I'm near the tail-end of the training plan and it's roughly:
And during marathon training it's hard to have the free time to do much else. I have free Mondays and Fridays but I just want to sit on the couch and do nothing those days. I have <3 weeks now until its over and I can't wait to have my free time back. I don't plan on running again any time soon...
When visiting Ireland in September where is the best place to go running?
Thanks,
Nicko
Hey Nicko! Sorry, I just saw this. It depends how long you want to run for and where you're based. I'm in central Dublin and a good place for short runs (<= 1-2 miles) is around St. Stephen's Green in the city centre. Phoenix Park is good for longer runs (3-12 miles). If you want to go for a really long run, you could try running the Howth cliff walk, but I don't really recommend it, as it's crowded and rocky -- it's a great place to break an ankle! Instead, run along the coast, from Dun Laoghaire up to and around Bull Island. Be careful on the coast because it can get quite cold and windy.
That's quite a lot of running! Solid plan though, you're going to do great. Do you have a goal finish time for the race?
Thanks! I think everyone who runs a marathon for the first time has an overly optimistic idea of how fast they can run it at the start of training. My original goal was 3h30m, which changed to 4h. Realistically, I'll probably finish closer to 5h, but my goal is under 4h.
Bahahaha true! The real time goal setting comes once you decide on your second one. You'll suffer the whole way, then the second you cross that finish line you'll ask "when's the next one?!"
Oof, that also sounds optimistic. I'll let you know how I feel in three weeks!
I ran a lot of Spartan Races for several years, it never failed that I was like "Never again!!" during the event but got that post-race high immediately after and had to do another.
First off! Wow!! Are there days when you feel absolutely fatigued as a multipotentialite? If yes, how do you deal with it and keep going, whether it is physics, coding, marathon and other various interests?
Thanks, Saral! Not fatigued, but more... pulled in different directions, if that makes sense? I'm interested in lots of different things and sometimes I feel like that makes me a "jack of all trades but master of none". But sometimes I'm happy to know a little bit about almost anything (I'm pretty good at pub quizzes). I think I'm getting to the point in my career where I need to focus more, though. So I'm leaning toward specialising in Java and JVM languages.
It sometimes helps to have varied interests, though, because it means that if you get bored with one, you can work on another for a while. I'm learning about quantum computing which combines my interests in physics and CS, but I can take a break from that and do some training for my marathon, or learn a new song on bass guitar (which I also play) or anything else. I think it helps with burnout to have a few different projects to work on, in different fields.
What part of being an astrophysicist relates most to the rest of your work in software?
I think it gave me an appreciation for breaking things down to their smallest parts. I did astroparticle physics, which involves studying particles by looking at their interactions indirectly, usually in space. I was part of a team looking for dark matter by studying its gravitational effects.
To understand how dark matter interacts at large scales, you need to understand its properties at small scales (ie. individually). I think that need to understand the building blocks of things relates to the things I'm interested in in software development. I hate using a library or package without understanding how it works under the hood.
Have you though about the complexity to create a Programming Language and the smarts minds behind it, and how-much-more the complexity of Human Genoma "Programming Language". It's fascinating, it's not?
Sorry about my english, I supposed you got the context.
Hi Marcos!
Your english is great! Much better than my Spanish, that's for sure.
Yeah, it's incredible how we think the things that we have built are so complex but they're nothing compared to biological complexity. To be fair, we've only been at it for a few hundred years and nature has had a 4.5-billion year head start. One of my favorite quotes about the complexity of biology is:
-- American Nuclear Physicist Emerson M. Pugh
Are you expat by choice or situation?
How has Ireland treated you?
Worried about Brexit?
Expat by choice! My fiancée is British and we dated long distance for a few years before deciding to move in together. It's very difficult for a U.S. citizen to get a British visa (and vice versa). It's much, much easier for an American to get into Ireland, and while the UK is still in the EU, Brits can just move to Ireland without any paperwork.
Ireland's been great so far! I enjoy my job and we live in the center of the city so it's easy to get almost anywhere on foot. We live between two thousand-year old cathedrals which is nuts for an American (coming from a country where "protected, historic" buildings are <200 years old). Beer is great, but expensive. Sugary cereal selection is sorely lacking.
I'm not personally worried about Brexit, though I get the feeling that some of my coworkers might be mildly concerned. It won't affect our industry too much but it could of course indirectly affect us if the cost of food, etc. increases. Any significant damage to the UK economy will affect Ireland more than any other country (besides the UK itself), so we're waiting to see how everything works out (and also laughing at the UK for putting itself in this situation in the first place, and then beautifully fumbling it to boot).
That's great to hear. About a year back I had an opportunity to move to the EU for a job but it fell through at the last minute. Now I got the bug and still want to go.
Happy to hear it is working out for you so far. Hope it continues to be amazing.
So tell me, are we anywhere close to measure gravity?
So, gravity is one of the four known fundamental forces of nature, along with electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. The weak nuclear force is related to nuclear decay and the strong nuclear force is what holds protons together in the nucleus of atoms.
Each of these forces has a "field strength" associated with it, which is a bit complicated and depends on the formula used to calculate the force of the interaction. In a nutshell, gravity is the weakest of the four forces... by a long shot.
If we normalise the "strength" of the gravitational force to
1, then the strength of the next-weakest force, the weak nuclear force, would be aboutGravity also falls of as
1/r^2or the inverse square of the distance between two masses (similar to the electromagnetic force). This means that gravity is only large for very large masses which are very close together. The best "experimental setup" we would have to measure the strength of the gravitational force would be the Earth-Moon system. This, of course, requires precisely knowing the masses of the Earth and Moon, though, which is also very difficult.Only a few months ago, a new study was released, measuring the strength of the gravitational constant, G to a new level of precision -- an uncertainty of only 11.6 parts per million. This is equivalent to a computer making 66,000 errors while copying a 6GB 4k HD movie.
For comparison, the current record for measuring the precision of
α, the fine-structure constant, which is related to the strength of an electromagnetic field, is about 0.23 parts per billion. This is equivalent to a computer making (on average) 1.38 errors while copying that same 6GB movie.what kind of software do you think you can develop in the field of Astrophysic?
High-energy, particle, and nuclear physicists mainly use C++. There is a huge package of scientific computing tools developed by CERN called ROOT, which is written in C++ but interfaces with Python and R. ROOT is used for simple analysis, machine learning, visualisation and so on.
It's not the easiest package to get used to but it has a crazy catalog of features. And because it all runs in C++ it is extremely fast, which is very important when you're looking at scientific data that could be TB or even PB in size.
So I'm not sure what new software could be developed. Most of the sciences use low-level features from languages like FORTRAN, C, or C++ because speed is usually the most important thing. I used FORTRAN in undergrad and mostly C and C++ in graduate school.