I am trying to be as perceptive as you rightly encourage me to be.

I particularly liked Amanda’s question – I remember having the same questions when I was a student. One of the drawbacks of physics compared with other subjects is that you have to study for so long before you can really see the “frontier”. (The same is not true in math, say, where one can state unsolved problems in terms which a high-school student can understand.)

And as a student you are mostly exposed to well-posed problems, and so your performance doesn’t give you a sense as to how you will perform once you have to formulate problems on your own, as in research.

The good news is that once you get to the frontier, there is no shortage of interesting problems laying around. It kind of reminds me of a time I took my kids to visit a beach on which fossils could be found. At first they seemed very hard to find, but once you found your first one all of a sudden you could see fossils everywhere.

Speaking for myself, I do indeed occasionally worry about my creativity dropping off, or having gone some amount of time without writing a new paper. These days I’d say I worry less, because I’ve gone through such worries a number of times and come out the other side, and so I suppose that, when I’m faced with such worries nowadays, I recall that things have always gone well before and that helps.

I should say that, looking back, such worries usually come when I’m not working well for another reason (personal, or health related, or any number of other things) and are not really a reflection of something intrinsic in my work or creative abilities. Most physicists continue to have useful and interesting ideas, for the reasons Clifford explained.

Of course, tenure helps one not to worry. By this, I don’t mean that one needn’t be so productive when tenured (one is still working just as hard). I mean that some of the pressures to write a large number of papers are less then, and one can perhaps focus a little more on quality, and some of the other fulfilling aspects of being a physicist.

For what it’s worth, perhaps the most important piece of advice to a young physicist who is occasionally gripped by such anxiety is to try to stop the anxiety preventing you from doing that next piece of work that will convince you there’s nothing to worry about. Some people just freeze up, and that, of course, can be a problem.

A trivial story about my cat’s food preferences, offered on it’s own, is just that: trivial. Nothing more! And that’s all harmless of course, but it’s not going to keep me coming back for more!

The stuff Wilson is famous for (the Operator Product Expansion, the Renormalization Group) came later, after he already had tenure.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying to repeat Wilson’s path. But I tend to agree with Clifford on the whole quality vs. quantity debate.

Incidently, the peppers would go great with a well-done steak, some mushrooms and scoop of mash potatoe, all washed done with very very cold beer.