I think you may be over-estimating the intelligence required to be a physicist. I don’t know what constitutes a meaningful contribution to physics, but there are certainly productive tenured professors who are not in the top 25% of quantitative ability.
Also, if you’re just motivated by interesting math problems, there are lots and lots of those in the world. Research is a lot less about interesting math problems than taking classes is. Research a lot of times is more about finding the right problem than just being able to solve it. It’s not clear to me that raw quantitative ability or even IQ is particularly well-correlated with the ability to ask the right questions.
Also, if you are primarily interested in solving problems, your grades may not be quite as good as people who are primarily interested in getting good grades. It’s usually possible to turn in a superficially good, but deeply flawed solution/derivation that gets significant partial credit. This is usually much easier that a full solution, but worth almost the same amount of points.
I think you may be over-estimating the intelligence required to be a physicist. I don’t know what constitutes a meaningful contribution to physics, but there are certainly productive tenured professors who are not in the top 25% of quantitative ability.
This is not true. According to Kaufman, Alan S. (2009). IQ Testing 101. New York: Springer Publishing MDs, JDs and PhDs have an average IQ of 125+. PhDs in Physics are going to have higher quantitative scores than that. I regret that being behind the Great Firewall I can’t source this but Steve Hsu wrote on his blog, infoproc.blogspot.com that he thinks the average professor of Physics is 1 in 100,000 in intelligence. I may be misremembering badly and the 1 in 100,000 could be anything from has a doctorate in Physics to is an outstanding contributor to Physics.
The idea that there are tenured professors of Physics who are just barely in the top quartile of quantitaive IQ is mindboggling. There will be few enough professors of English with quantitative IQs that low.
Is this the post you’re looking to cite? From what I’ve been able to tell looking at that post and some related sources physicists seem to be about 2 standard deviations above the norm on average, with an uncertainty in that average measurement of a couple IQ points. This makes a physicist something like 1 in 50, rather than 1 in 100,000. Unfortunately it’s not really clear what the standard deviation is for those numbers. An average, by itself tells you very little about a distribution. If we assume that the standard deviation of IQ scores of physics Ph.D.s is close to that of the rest of the population (this may be a bad assumption) then we expect 10% of physics doctorate holders to have an IQ of 110 or less, which would put them outside of the top quartile of the IQ distribution. You could play around with the parameters for the distribution here and come up with a bunch of different results, and I’m not totally sure which ones are meaningful.
I may be wrong. I may be framing the problem wrong. I may not have a good picture of just how bad merely average quantitative skills are. I do work with a lot of people who have Ph.Ds in physics and while some of them certainly have remarkable quantitative skills, others really don’t. I know people who have gotten doctorates in physics who didn’t score particularly well on the GRE. This is especially true in experimental physics (in physics the standard joke is that as a theorist you don’t have to study anything that exists in the real world, and as an experimentalist you don’t have to get the math right). Physicists are pretty smart people, but they’re not all 1 in 100k and that’s certainly not a requirement for being a physicist. Also, I think the level of quantitative ability necessary for physics research is often below the level needed to muddle through the coursework.
I think you may be over-estimating the intelligence required to be a physicist. I don’t know what constitutes a meaningful contribution to physics, but there are certainly productive tenured professors who are not in the top 25% of quantitative ability.
Also, if you’re just motivated by interesting math problems, there are lots and lots of those in the world. Research is a lot less about interesting math problems than taking classes is. Research a lot of times is more about finding the right problem than just being able to solve it. It’s not clear to me that raw quantitative ability or even IQ is particularly well-correlated with the ability to ask the right questions.
Also, if you are primarily interested in solving problems, your grades may not be quite as good as people who are primarily interested in getting good grades. It’s usually possible to turn in a superficially good, but deeply flawed solution/derivation that gets significant partial credit. This is usually much easier that a full solution, but worth almost the same amount of points.
This is not true. According to Kaufman, Alan S. (2009). IQ Testing 101. New York: Springer Publishing MDs, JDs and PhDs have an average IQ of 125+. PhDs in Physics are going to have higher quantitative scores than that. I regret that being behind the Great Firewall I can’t source this but Steve Hsu wrote on his blog, infoproc.blogspot.com that he thinks the average professor of Physics is 1 in 100,000 in intelligence. I may be misremembering badly and the 1 in 100,000 could be anything from has a doctorate in Physics to is an outstanding contributor to Physics.
The idea that there are tenured professors of Physics who are just barely in the top quartile of quantitaive IQ is mindboggling. There will be few enough professors of English with quantitative IQs that low.
Is this the post you’re looking to cite? From what I’ve been able to tell looking at that post and some related sources physicists seem to be about 2 standard deviations above the norm on average, with an uncertainty in that average measurement of a couple IQ points. This makes a physicist something like 1 in 50, rather than 1 in 100,000. Unfortunately it’s not really clear what the standard deviation is for those numbers. An average, by itself tells you very little about a distribution. If we assume that the standard deviation of IQ scores of physics Ph.D.s is close to that of the rest of the population (this may be a bad assumption) then we expect 10% of physics doctorate holders to have an IQ of 110 or less, which would put them outside of the top quartile of the IQ distribution. You could play around with the parameters for the distribution here and come up with a bunch of different results, and I’m not totally sure which ones are meaningful.
I may be wrong. I may be framing the problem wrong. I may not have a good picture of just how bad merely average quantitative skills are. I do work with a lot of people who have Ph.Ds in physics and while some of them certainly have remarkable quantitative skills, others really don’t. I know people who have gotten doctorates in physics who didn’t score particularly well on the GRE. This is especially true in experimental physics (in physics the standard joke is that as a theorist you don’t have to study anything that exists in the real world, and as an experimentalist you don’t have to get the math right). Physicists are pretty smart people, but they’re not all 1 in 100k and that’s certainly not a requirement for being a physicist. Also, I think the level of quantitative ability necessary for physics research is often below the level needed to muddle through the coursework.