• Question: do you emjoy your work or would you like to retire asap? Campbell Adamson

    Asked by adamsc1 to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 8 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by hannahralston, scottini12.
    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 8 Nov 2013:

      I’m 25 so retiring hasn’t really crossed my mind yet!

      I love what I do and I doubt I’ll ever get bored of it. There’s so many questions that need answering, so much stuff to find out. Maybe when I’m a grumpy old man I’ll see things differently, but I hope not.

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 8 Nov 2013:

      Both. 🙂
      Seriously, even though I may seem old to you at 40 years of age, this is still way below official retirement age. But, being a scientist is quite a demanding job. We tend to work a lot, have many deadlines, for example if a big conference is coming up and you need to have shiny new results to present there but those results don’t come easily. Plus, in my case it doesn’t help that I have three little kids to take care of with a wife working more than full-time too, and all our relatives living a thousand miles away. Oh, and then I am trying to rebuild our house in my remaining spare time. All that sometimes really makes me want to retire right now. 🙂
      Except that I know I won’t do it. Not now, because I couldn’t afford it financially, and not ever, because the job is too interesting to ever stop doing it. Particle physicists rarely ever retire. When they reach retirement age, they just keep on working for less (or no) money. I am not kidding.

    • Photo: Venus Keus

      Venus Keus answered on 10 Nov 2013:

      Why would I want to retire? This is the best job on the planet. Seriously! You get paid to learn new things that you are interested in, invent new ideas, tell people about it, talk to others and see what new things they have learned,… It’s just so fun that you don’t even care about the working hours (not that there are any set hours that you have to be in the office), you work overtime because you’re just so keen to see where this model you just built leads you. And people are always keen to help you further your ideas. It’s like we all have one goal and that is to understand what is going on in the universe. I absolutely love it!
      The other great thing about doing physics is that it strengthens your brain and your problem solving abilities so much that you can learn any other subject so quickly. You basically are gaining some super-power.

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      I love my work, but I cannot pretend that I do not have days when early retirement is very tempting……

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      I don’t think I’ll ever retire because I will never reach the time when I understand all the things I want to understand. Of course people might stop paying me but that won’t stop me.

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