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Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2017 14:05:37 -0500
Coders and graduate computer scientists a different beast djf Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: January 16, 2017 at 12:50:53 PM EST To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com Move Over, Coders—Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley By Cade Metz Jan 16 2017 <https://www.wired.com/2017/01/move-coders-physicists-will-soon-rule-silicon-valley/> It’s a bad time to be a physicist. At least, that’s what Oscar Boykin says. He majored in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in 2002 he finished a physics PhD at UCLA. But four years ago, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland discovered the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first predicted in the 1960s. As Boykin points out, everyone expected it. The Higgs didn’t mess with the theoretical models of the universe. It didn’t change anything or give physcists anything new to strive for. “Physicists are excited when there’s something wrong with physics, and we’re in a situation now where there’s not a lot that’s wrong,” he says. “It’s a disheartening place for a physicist to be in.” Plus, the pay isn’t too good. Boykin is no longer a physicist. He’s a Silicon Valley software engineer. And it’s a very good time to be one of those. Boykin works at Stripe, a $9-billion startup that helps businesses accept payments online. He helps build and operate software systems that collect data from across the company’s services, and he works to predict the future of these services, including when, where, and how the fraudulent transactions will come. As a physicist, he’s ideally suited to the job, which requires both extreme math and abstract thought. And yet, unlike a physicist, he’s working in a field that now offers endless challenges and possibilities. Plus, the pay is great. If physics and software engineering were subatomic particles, Silicon Valley has turned into the place where the fields collide. Boykin works with three other physicists at Stripe. In December, when General Electric acquired the machine learning startup Wise.io, CEO Jeff Immelt boasted that he had just grabbed a company packed with physicists, most notably UC Berkeley astrophysicist Joshua Bloom. The open source machine learning software H20, used by 70,000 data scientists across the globe, was built by Swiss physicist Arno Candel, who once worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Vijay Narayanan, Microsoft’s head of data science, is an astrophysicist, and several other physicists work under him. It’s not on purpose, exactly. “We didn’t go into the physics kindergarten and steal a basket of children,” says Stripe president and co-founder John Collison. “It just happened.” And it’s happening across Silicon Valley. Because structurally and technologically, the things that just about every internet company needs to do are more and more suited to the skill set of a physicist. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
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- Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley Dave Farber (Jan 16)