Hey, Seth here. When you last met my sister, she had just graduated from MIT. Since then, she has moved to Berkeley, gone to (and worked for) a cooking school, and started an internship at Tikkun magazine. I don’t mention this to indulge my brotherly instinct to make fun of her for trying so many different things — which I am the first to admit is quite unfair anyway — but rather to point you to the first results of her latest project. As part of her magazine internship, she’s writing a series of blog entries about science, and her first piece was on the Higgs boson and its unfortunate nickname, “the God particle.” She’s done more background research than I’ve ever done, but I’m pleased to note that her conclusions are the same as mine: that term wasn’t physicists’ idea, we don’t like it, and it keeps getting used because it’s dramatic press. You can read what she wrote here.
Related to the first part of this post about your sister going into cooking school and eventually writing for a magazine:
It would be interesting and educational if the authors and readers of this blog could volunteer to post some of the experiences they see of their fellow graduate students or post-docs on careers outside of academia. I’m curious – where do high energy PhD people end up, if not academia?
In fact, could someone volunteer a post to this?