How does one find out if one is talented?
In music it is easy. Just listen to what you play. Does it sound good? Does it paint a picture? Convey emotion? Are all the scales used properly? How about harmony? Do people like it? And really, the first and last ones are all there is to it.
Computer science is a bit trickier, but it also seems doable. Can you write code that is bug-free? Is it readable? Do you know all the key technologies relevant? Do you mind reading documentation for a long time before starting? Do you sit a think about the problem before you jump into emacs? Can you evaluate your time-cost to benefit ratio for tasks?
But, my wife seems harder. How does one find out if one should -- rather, if one is
good enough to -- do physics. Well, I certainly have a passion, no doubt there. I love the subject and it gets more and more interesting and lovable as I progress (hehe...some may say that's not the natural progression of marriage! :-). Nonetheless, I can't get myself to do a qual problem in less than 2 or 3 hours or even longer sometimes. I usually know how to proceed relatively quickly, but then it takes a long while to get all the details straight. I think I'm expected to be able to do these in about 45 minutes time or so. Is that a bad sign? Does that mean that I'm not clever enough to see all the tricks that would allow it to be done quicker? And if so, is that bad?
To an experimentalist, probably not too bad, so long you can pass them by studying, memorizing and such. And there is quite a few things that attract me to the experimental world. Specially in, say, Quantum Optics. However, I think I'm a theorist at heart. I find it a lot neater to come up with models and theories and work some mathematical witchery to come up with answers and predictions than to have to work around the ~5x10^6 experimental details that come about because the world hasn't been bought at the physics store. You know, the place where you get massless strings, frictionless surfaces, perfect thermal insulation and other kinds of idealizations. Yeah, definitely, figuring out how to do Gaussian integrals the other day was neat. And even neater to use it to do stat mech. But, do a measurement? Sure. Eh...where do I stick the thermometer?... What do you mean it is not so simple? Yuk dude. Okay, this is just a long way to explain that I am rather theoretically inclined.
So, the question remains. Am I good enough to do this stuff? Is it like Davey said: too late for you need to start in high school to be a successful theoretical physicist? Given the job market I'd like to know if I'd be shooting myself in the foot twice, by becoming a theoretical (bang!) physicist (bang!) or attempting to anyways.
I guess we'll find out a bit about this by friday. I am almost certain that I'm not going to do as well as I had hoped on the quals -- I'm diagnosing failure on all three (that's ok, I don't have to pass them before I start the program). It is frustrating, though! I know how to do the problems, but not quick enough and I make tons of errors along the way despite that they eventually get fixed (that takes time). I wish there was a simple boolean function to which I could plug myself into to tell me whether or not I have the ability and talent necessary. Oh yeah, and I hope that said function is
not the subject GRE -- sore subject! :-)
