re: Is chasing Theoretical Physics a waste of time if you’re not brilliant?

Put the fries in the bag.

Try Quantum Physics.....it will challenge all you thought you knew about physics from a .......theoretical standpoint.

Then you have an unique take on the subject. Its not always the brightest in a field that makes great discoveries, it is sometimes people that look at things differently. Maybe, they are so far past everyone else they can't see the obvious.

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Relativity?

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Boi, dat ain’t nobody, dats juss my baby daddy.

I just round pi off to 3 to simplify the math.

I did land surveying for about a year and wasn’t making any money at it and heard of a job opening at a Christmas party.

Four physics professors had gotten a grant from the National Science Foundation for proving some probability theory on muons and needed a detector built to test their theory . The detector would operate in a small collider in Germany. I interviewed and got the job. I was to do the engineering on the project and was ‘ given’ 6 grad students to the grunt work. We a had year to build it.

While building this contraption I learned a lot. Like anything else there is a vast amount of politics in science. If there is money politics will follow and you have to be able to navigate it. With this NSF grant other universities were involved . One in Hamburg, Boston U, Univ. of Chicago and Los Alamos. They were responsible for their parts of the project and I got to travel and work at those places.

Without probability all of Quantum physics collapses. I met physics people who had met all the requirements of of PhD but were not allowed to be physics professors, they were called post docs, sort of like a purgatory of physics professors.

After this muon detector was completed I worked on a neutrino detector at Los Alamos. When the grant money runs out the jobs evaporate.
Don’t get any romantic notions about being a physics professor, sure they teach at places like Harvard, but also in places like Nicholls and Grambling.

Now I work construction building bridges and highways.

If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics ~ Richard Feynman

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Questioning my ability and my goals.

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If you aren't capable of Nobel Prize work, don't do it.

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Four physics professors had gotten a grant from the National Science Foundation for proving some probability theory on muons and needed a detector built to test their theory . The detector would operate in a small collider in Germany. I interviewed and got the job. I was to do the engineering on the project and was ‘ given’ 6 grad students to the grunt work. We a had year to build it.

After this muon detector was completed I worked on a neutrino detector at Los Alamos. When the grant money runs out the jobs evaporate.

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Right now, joint NSF/DOE projects like those are competing heavily against each other for the declining amount of funding. Constricting availability and astronomically high costs of things like Ge-76 these days, certainly don't help.

If you don't have a strong grasp of calculus, multivariate calculus, differential equations and a few other advanced math topics stick to physics as a fun hobby. I like reading about various topics in physics and have started reading and watching videos about the physics that was covered in the book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.