The BBC reports that start-up runs of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern are going well. That’s great. I do feel pangs though, reading about all this. In a very close possible world, I’d have taken up the offer of a research studentship with the high energy particle physics group in DAMTP and worked with the likes of Jeffrey Goldstone and John Polkinghorne and been around in the days of the birth of the Standard Model which is being tested to the limit at Cern (tested to destruction?? — we’ll see).
Of course the choice I made to jump to philosophy was mine, and it’s been quite fun. But these days, especially here in Cambridge, students get a lot more mentoring than I ever had — and given better advice, I’d have probably not made the decision I did.
Have you written anywhere how you ended up doing what you’re doing? I find shifts in career direction interesting, given my move from comp sci, and a desire to be a programmer on telecommunications systems, to psych of reasoning.