Good points, Emmanuel, but I (mildly) beg to differ.

The first point is, if we tend to think that in Physics, we may be at risk of devastating our lives by barking up the wrong tree ... then look at maths.

Mathematicians routinely spend whole lifetimes contending with one problem - and then not finding the key.

Sometimes, some go unbalanced (Gödel, unhinged by the continuum hypothesis, & others.) Sometimes, some find (Andrew Wiles). Some currently wrack their heads on the remaining millennium problems ... and look back at decades of their lives spent searching and not finding.

But there is beauty in this - where would we be if scientists had not taken chances ? Wasn't it Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) who said once that 'every life seen from the inside is but a long series of failures'? Yet George Orwell made a unique contribution.

So you cannot choose your field or your thesis on the basis of practical, career, money considerations. This is not how the system is supposed to work.

The only way you can, and indeed must, set the subject of your research is finding something that you fully resonate with, and dare it.

This is how we got Andrew Wiles, this is how mankind was lucky enough to get Shing Tung Yau, who felt a passion for geometry (a subject that would leave many cold), this is how we got Cédric Villani, and so many others.

Good points, Emmanuel, but I (mildly) beg to differ.

The first point is, if we tend to think that in Physics, we may be at risk of devastating our lives by barking up the wrong tree ... then look at maths.

Mathematicians routinely spend whole lifetimes contending with one problem - and then not finding the key.

Sometimes, some go unbalanced (Gödel, unhinged by the continuum hypothesis, & others.) Sometimes, some find (Andrew Wiles). Some currently wrack their heads on the remaining millennium problems ... and look back at decades of their lives spent searching and not finding.

But there is beauty in this - where would we be if scientists had not taken chances ? Wasn't it Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) who said once that 'every life seen from the inside is but a long series of failures'? Yet George Orwell made a unique contribution.

So you cannot choose your field or your thesis on the basis of practical, career, money considerations. This is not how the system is supposed to work.

The only way you can, and indeed must, set the subject of your research is finding something that you fully resonate with, and dare it.

This is how we got Andrew Wiles, this is how mankind was lucky enough to get Shing Tung Yau, who felt a passion for geometry (a subject that would leave many cold), this is how we got Cédric Villani, and so many others.

Dear Chris,

this is really a researcher's paradise.

Find your passion in research-whatever this is- and make it real.

I like this approach the most..

How many years passed between postulating existence of neutrinos and their experimental discovery ? Now we are in the similar situation concerning existence of dark matter. Discovery of the Higgs boson pushes limits on the supersymmetric particles masses higher than before (> 1TeV) explaining while it was not yet possible to find them at the LHC.For recent news on this - see the symposium

http://tmex2013.fuw.edu.pl/ presentations.

"I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."

--Michael Jordan

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

--Theodore Roosevelt

I ask where will science be if it was not for failure?