A sleepless night at Incheon Airport

At the moment it is 1 AM at Incheon Airport. My wife and I are going to take a flight in the early morning so we have no choice but to sleep here. The bench here is of course much less comfortable to my bed. I can't sleep. And I start to reminisce my 2025 year so far... I also want to just my thoughts down.

Lately I have been on several business trips, hence been to many places and have talked to many people. It was quite a unsual experience since I am always tighted with my working desk to do physics: read papers, devise code, analyze data, write manuscripts,... I love my job and you can say that it is my comfort zone. I hone my physics skills while being there. On the other hand, my comfort zone can create a bad habitat to follow the conventional path whenever I attempt to solve a problem!

My business trips brought me to physics worlds in nearly two end of the spectrum. One is experimental work on scanning tunneling microscope (STM) where it is extremely complicated to get your machine work properly. The other one is theoretical (polariton and exciton to be specific) where you define the Hamiltonian and squeeze information from it as much as possible using math. (Well, this is not a physics blog so I am not gonna go into details.) I feel amazed by the breath of physics and at the same time, feel grateful to have such opportunities experiencing these.

What is my own niche? I am in my postdoc, a transition between getting PhD degree and becoming a tenured Professor. Not all PhD degree holders eventually become Professors. It is a brutal fact in academia. Beside a ton of luck, having a convincing answer to the question is very crucial to become a physics Professor, i.e. a job where you lead a research group in a university. It is not easy to answer the question. You need a certain depth and breadth in understanding physics to find you niche, in other words, to convince peers that your research topics are worth to investigate. Staying in your comfort zone will limit your horizons. Therefore, I promise myself to take advantage of these business trips to expand my understanding.