a_t = mu(s_t)

S and O, respectively

annoying.... doesn't support math symbols?

Omniscience ?

interesting idea - RL with unreliable narrators

Wittgenstein lol

I'm not sure I love the meme here. It's amusing, and I have no issue with a casual tone, but this picture is visually distracting. It makes it hard to "see" the important stuff above and below it.

If you want something to break up the text, could you instead make a quick plot of the number of papers published overall in physics, or something like that?

"All of physics" is a very ambiguous term. How many papers did you analyze? Did you analyze titles? Abstracts? Full-text?

Re: analyzing the buzzword: you need to mention your methodology. You don't have to describe everything about how it works, but you should justify why you took that approach and how it relates to the problem/user

For topic modeling, you could mention that it's not very helpful to just compare the "popularity" of the different categories on arxiv. You might want something more specific. Moreover, you might want to think about transferable skills. Neural networks are a great example here! Should a physicist get into machine learning? Here's a good way to discover/address that question.

I like that you have plotted the rate of change as well as the total numbers. But it would be helpful if the two "types" charts were more visually distinct. Even a color change would help.

Labeling the y-axis isn't that helpful here, because it's a lot of work (this makes me sound lazy, I know) to read rotated text.

I'm okay with casual tone, but there must be a better way to mention that this is unexpected.

I don't see this bar chart here.

This suggests the problem, and generally this whole paragraph suggests the problem, but it's not stated very clearly. These are more like the properties that characterize the problem.

How about something to the effect of:

Undergraduate research experience is a major factor in graduate admissions. Picking a relevant research topic is a problem for budding scholars: "How do I get a clear view of the research landscape? How do I know what matters in my field?"

..

Moreover, you should mention that you can't solve this problem by reading papers or scanning their titles - how many papers are presented each year? What does something like "Comparative optic and dosimetric characterization of the HYPERSCINT scintillation dosimetry research platform for multipoint applications" even MEAN?

These details will improve your hook, and the problem statement is something I definitely need to see. Feel free to adapt the suggestion I gave, but it would probably help to make it more specific.