A Life That Could Have Been . . .

7 April 2023 - Adetswil

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In 2003, as I was finishing up my third bachelor's degree in the German language, I applied and was admitted to the Nuclear Engineering graduate program at GA Tech, where I'd gotten my first two bachelor's degrees in Physics and Applied Math. My plan was to study the problem of commercializing fusion and to solve it for humanity. Young people in their early twenties still believe they can do anything. Classes started off auspiciously enough, as I got to exercise the science muscles in my brain again. But disillusionment soon set in. The one professor focused on fusion was making physics errors that I easily spotted and the head of the department clearly did not think much of him. Additionally I realized that funding was not to be had in the field, so I would be piling up another mountain of debt atop the one I had created as an undergraduate. The joke at the time was that fusion had been 30 years in the future since 1960 and always would be. Fusion is a hard problem, and without the best monds working on it would remain uncracked. I might have contnued if the financial burden hadn't have been there, but I had a growing family. So I quit before the first semester was up and set my sights on an more funding rich sector of science: high energy physics. And a year later I started grad school again with a full scholarship plus a stipend. Thus I was able to knock out a master's and work at Stanford's Linear Accelerator for a year before disillusionment finally led me to leave academia for good.

Twenty years after I quit working on fusion the forefront of reseaerch is no longer in academia, but in industry. Billions of dollars is being spent on companies with various ideas how to build a commercial reactor. Had I not left the field at it's lowest ebb, I could be in the thick of that excitement. I suppose I still could be if I really wanted to. Visiting CERN a couple years ago I caught a glimpse of what that life could have been like; where I might be if I had finished my Ph.D. I spent my 20's and 30's focused on my kids because I thought they were the most important thing I could do with my life. And now three out of four hate me because their mother does. Marriage doesn't often survive a Ph.D., and while I gave up one to preserve the other she made the opposite decision. So now I view the happy family life from the outside just like I view the life of science. Out for drinks with younger colleagues earlier this week, they all talked about why they weren't having kids: not ready, not interested, don't want to bring children into a world that will be destroyed by global warming. I feel schackled with a worldview from a bygone era that I can't seem to shake, but at the same time I know that if no one has kids in a culture then it will cease to exist.

It's useful to look at what might have been, but not to dwell so much on it. You only get one life, and I'm still busy stuffing things into it. Running, travel, helping people to become better versions of themselves - these all give meaning to a rewarding life. As does having a loving partner in Iwona to spend my days with and share our burdens. The fusion of our lives has given us both abundant energy.