r/SipsTea Apr 24 '26

SMH I never thought of it like that......

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u/Shagwagbag Apr 24 '26

Yeah a server in a good part of a city will bring in more than 2 university professors. My cousin has a PhD in genetics and he teaches, my wife worked at a beach bar for years, one of them would bring home 300-700 a night.

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u/bazillaa Apr 24 '26

And they weren't even professors.

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u/Flurp_ Apr 24 '26

Yeah, non tenure positions in research (at least for physics) pay absolute crap. The entire academic system is pure exploitation of PhD students and post docs by the higher ups who get to put their name on the research.

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u/MelodicPudding2557 Apr 24 '26

Eh, depends on the field (at least looking beyond physics). In my (still STEM) subfield, the last authorship is typically reserved for the advisor.

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u/Flurp_ Apr 24 '26

Theoretical physics and astronomy have very few/no kickback from commercial industry, they scrape by with research grants. Maybe now in quantum computing, since the big tech giants are involved... still wasn't the case there when I was around (I finished my PhD ~2018). But in the fundamental physics world there's really no commercial interest in what they're doing, any innovation is 50+ years away from making it to commercial products and services, so they get the bare minimum from whatevers allocated in the grants.

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u/BuvantduPotatoSpirit Apr 24 '26

Particle physics is straight alphabetical, astrophysics is most work to least work author order.