And my original "joke" is that the Schrodinger operator is unitary on L2 spaces (which is like a mathematical statement of conservation of "energy"), so if we're throwing out unitarity then I may as well throw out my phd.

I actually studied dispersive pdes (Schodinger, KdV, etc.), though not with a computer. In that study, the properties of the Fourier transform on L2-based spaces are very important.

The other joke is a that I do software now, so of course the phd was useless, haha!