Being Adult About It

Inextricably needed to clarify these for myself.

The phrase was used in the 2022-2023 Quantum Field Theory course back at Auckland organised by Dr. M. T. Mueller. It arose in class when he was describing a long-winded calculation, probably an S-matrix, and a student asked him how to independently get there with confidence — for example under an exam setting — that one could navigate the physics without taking a mathematical wrong turn on this meandering and dazzling journey of complex equations and subtle transformations.

“Just be adult about it,” he said, and the lecture continued.

That message stuck with me, verbatim and yet on the surface level for a long time, of course — everything FWPhys.com/blog presents are marinades (of various molecular weights and polarity) brushed onto a piece of figurative roast, some diffuse into the core, informing how I navigate the world, some become crispy glitter that tastes like bitter might-have-beens — I wish this does settle in.

“Just be adult about it.”

What did he mean there? Not in the context of evaluating an S-matrix, I still suck at those, I outline three connected interpretations of this expression.

To Act Responsibly

Physics as a vocation / life dedication compared to physics as a school subject is like what a skyscraper construction is to a sand castle. Similar principles are at play, and the latter can be extensively modelled to look like the former, and both can be deep with probed with enough drive and curiosity. However, different things are at stake.

I found discomfort in the acquired notion that science — scientists’s humanity¹: expression, connections, collaborations — is result-oriented and transactional, see the previous post², but fail to come up with an alternative. The real enemy is the unknown, and in organising humanity’s efforts, naturally, compartmentalised, efficient, and responsible work prevail, if nothing for the administrative smoothness and coherence.

In this light, working like an adult indeed does not strictly correspond to being exhaustively precise everywhere. Fly by Night Physics³ and error propagation are part of our job routine of course. But even the fuzzy computations and estimations require sensibility, insight, and rules, upon which one can inform the greater collective.

To Act with Deserved Confidence

I have always seen pen and paper work sessions — and sometimes Python debugging afternoons –as extremely liberating. I trust my mental facilities and my tools, memorised differentio-integral identities and so on, and when I don’t, I derive joy in knowing where to look (the rest are horror⁴, not denying that).

Being adults here means knowing to seek such opportunities, and knowing to seek them with moderation As much as I hate GPTSpeak — one needs to learn to dive into something, and doing so with self-reliance and independence. Deserved confidence come as responsible, natural, and at the same time courageous results of rigorous training and practice. One of course needs to recognise the depth and commitment and behave realistically in order to find and reach domains where one’s mind is free and the aforementioned liberation can be found and not burn oneself out.

To Act with Integrity

I am — really — beginning to write up a paper for which I eagerly anticipate scathing reviews up to and including a rejection for publication, for the potentially oversimplified nature of the model I sank 6 months in creating a mockup Lyman Alpha Forest, for which I am still far from an expert. I prefer such outcomes, whatever they may be, than any more delays. Expecting perfection before typing up the first draft is delusional and ultimately opposite of the values I present around here.

A joke I heard in Berkeley was from a professor moving back from EU (240V) to the US (110V), and wiring a voltage downconverter in reverse only to see it blow up. He remarked with humour, that the difference between engineers and physicists were the former does their best to prevent such explosions, while the latter derive significant insight and joy from seeing one.

To me, the reason to list integrity separately from responsibility is a tacit admission that things do go wrong from time to time. A theory that dances around every method to nullify it rather than fight back is alarmingly counterproductive. A scientist who never makes a public mistake probably isn’t thinking very hard. Own up to everything one puts into the world, and learn from their echoes. Easier said than done.

Ending Words

Science is often driven by deep personal motivations—few are “born to optimise the international financial reporting standards,” but many are born to wonder. Yet, the “adult” realisation is that science is not a private sandbox; it is a collective enterprise. We owe a debt to Nature that provides our data, to the colleagues whose time and mental space we occupy, and to humanity whose resources we expend.

This realisation gives weight to every second I claim the title of physicist. While weighing dark matter or modulating gravitational waves may offer no immediate clinical benefit⁵, these acts represent a rare, fragile opportunity in history to push our understanding of the Universe forward, and hopefully expand the space of possibilities for the people to come.

1. I do have after work time to use other parts of my humanity. Clarifying that I know that. ↩︎
2. Or maybe future ones, Goettingen has ample ghosts for me to talk to and I’ve got a few more minutes here ↩︎
3. A. Zee’s great book. ↩︎
4. Horror — complex concepts objectively beyond grasp — exist, of course. The latest example I saw being the gravitational force between two unit cubes, laplace transform used in ways I never saw before. The Challenge of Sixfold Integrals: The Closed-Form Evaluation of Newton Potentials between Two Cubes by Folkmar Bornemann, arXiv 2204.02793 ↩︎
5. Language borrowed from Why do we do astrophysics? by David W. Hogg, arXiv 2602.10181 ↩︎