EXPOSED
A large share of a physicist's week — literature review, simulation and analysis code, fitting models to data, drafting papers and grant text — is exactly what current AI does at usable quality, and computational/theory work is where that bite is deepest. What resists is designing an experiment that has never been run, building and debugging real apparatus (cryostats, beamlines, optics benches, detectors), and deciding which anomaly is physics versus instrument artifact. Modal employment is national-lab, federal, and industrial R&D; medical physicists inside this bucket carry board certification and radiation-safety accountability that most other physicists do not.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 11 reflects the split inside the actual job: the analysis pipeline, Monte Carlo work, Mathematica derivations, and manuscript drafting that fill most of a computational or theory physicist's week are already being done at usable quality by models, while aligning an optics bench, chasing a vacuum leak, commissioning a beamline shift, or judging that a 3-sigma bump is a bad calibration run has no digital substitute — enough irreplaceable work to keep it out of the single digits, not enough to reach the mid-teens where wet-lab and field scientists sit.
Some physical or field component. A 9 puts physicists above pure desk work because cryostat assembly, detector installation, cleanroom fabrication, and accelerator hall access are real hands-on hours, but the environments are controlled — a temperature-stabilised lab or a shielded vault, not a rig floor or a storm — and a substantial fraction of the occupation (theorists, HEP analysts, modelers) never touches hardware at all.
Certification preferred, not legally required. A 5 is the weighted reality: the PhD is a hiring credential with no licensing statute behind it, and only the medical physics slice carries ABR board certification plus state radiation-machine registration where a treatment-plan error lands on a named individual — that minority is what lifts the score off the floor rather than any protection covering the beamline or condensed-matter physicist.
Some relationship component. A 7 recognises that program managers at DOE and NSF fund people they know and that industrial R&D clients keep a specific physicist on a problem for years, but the deliverable is a validated result, a working instrument, or a peer-reviewed paper that stands or falls on reproducibility — the referees are anonymous and the data does not care who took it.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls. A 14 is earned by calls that no procedure covers: declaring a measurement publishable, setting the systematic error budget that determines whether a discovery claim survives, deciding a novel apparatus is safe to energise, and in the clinical case approving a dose distribution that will be delivered to a patient — decisions where being wrong costs a retraction, a destroyed multi-million-dollar instrument, or a radiation injury.
Has AI actually changed your work?