The Complete Guide to Becoming A Physicist

Chapter 1: What Does a Physicist Actually Do?

You've seen the photographs: a physicist in a clean lab coat, staring at a hologram of a DNA strand or pressurizing a tokamak reactor. The camera angle suggests that the person is about to solve a deep mystery of the cosmos in the next few minutes. The reality is almost never that dramatic. So let's start by clearing the air: a day in the life of a physicist is rarely a series of eureka moments. It is a job. A fascinating, demanding, occasionally tedious job that involves as much paperwork and code debugging as it does conceptual breakthrough. If you're considering this career, you need to know exactly what you're signing up for.

At its core, a physicist is a problem solver who uses the laws of nature to explain what we see or to build something new. The job title covers an enormous range of activities. An experimental physicist designs, builds, runs, and fixes machinery to measure a property of the universe — the charge of an electron, the conductivity of a novel material, the trajectory of a particle after a collision. A theoretical physicist, on the other hand, uses mathematics and logic to build models that explain known phenomena and predict new ones. They rarely touch a piece of hardware; the equipment becomes paper, a whiteboard, and a laptop running Python or Mathematica.

In practice, most working physicists do a mixture of things that isn't defined by a single task.