[epistemic status: this is mostly vague impressions I’ve accumulated]

I’m an undergraduate physicist interested in effective altruism, and have noticed in several places (here, here) that physics is offhandedly mentioned as a promising research area and/or skill to possess. However, so far, I haven’t seen any specifics; no indexing of research topics in physics with DALY numbers and instructions, or organisations that hire physicists, or anything like that.

I can’t write that article either, though to get something in this space (hey, it's highly neglected!) I’m going to describe some uses of physics and EA areas where I’ve seen physics be done.

Not Doing Physics

The EA recommendation I tend to see for physicists is to not do physics. I mean, nobody's said that explicitly, but physics has been passed over in recommendations for other fields for potentially good reasons.

Physics is, instead, useful because it gives you good quantitative skills, and a physics qualification is useful because it gives you a reliable signal of quantitative skills. Instead, consider a more useful field to employ the power of mathematics, like AI safety (via computer science) or global priorities research (via economics).

This is somewhat uninspiring to those excited by physics, though not as much as at first glance: AI safety is still about discovering universal truths, and global priorities research is still about using mathematics to predict experimental outcomes.

Still, there are some things that can be done even within the purview of the physics department, which is what the rest of this post is about.

Studying the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe

Most of the value that a civilisation will produce lies in the far future, and that means that the shape of the far future dictates how civilisation will behave and how much value it will capture. The long-term evolution of the universe is dictated by cosmology. Whatever conclusions are drawn have big implications in what behaviour we should expect to see from other civilisations, if any, and potentially in what our civilisation should do.

Some work I’ve seen in this area is Bostrom’s Astronomical waste paper which follows from knowledge about the size of the universe and the rate of loss of usable mass-energy. Knowing more about this would give better bounds on the tradeoff between existential risk and hastening technological d...

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