Leonardo Pacciani-Mori @LeoPaccianiMori@qoto.org

@obi yeah. I mean, in "traditional" physics we are at a point where in order to even keep up with the latest theory you need to spend YEARS studying the mathematical tools needed to handle them, and conversely you need YEARS of experience to be able to build and use the machines needed to verify the theories experimentally (think about the Large Hadron Collider: each upgrade takes years and requires the work of thousands of people with years of experience). In biology this problem simply does not exist. In my case, for example, I had to spend a few months in the lab learning how to do some measurements and then I was able to just pick up and start any experiment I wanted (and experiments take days, a few weeks at worst, instead of years)

@obi yeah I mean it's not like the mindset is not there at all. Lots of people that do the switch still only do only theoretical or experimental work. But there's a whole community of people that sits in the middle (me included)

@obi The situation is very similar to what was happening in quantum mechanics in the 1920s/1930s: lots of data and interesting phenomena that are observed, there's no really unifying theory to describe most of them and people work on both their theory and experiments (or viceversa on their experiments and the theories that explain them)

@obi but in the past few decades a lot of physicists have realized that there are A LOT of interesting problems to be studied in biology, and so lots of people are moving there, very often switching from theory to experiment

@obi and generally speaking it is pretty much unheard of that someone in a "traditional" branch of physics moves from theory to experiment or viceversa

@obi MUCH more common than what you would imagine, at least for the specific case of physicists going into biology. When I was studying physics in college the chasm between theory and experiment was deep and very entrenched in people's mind

#introduction

Theoretical physicist by training but I work on biological problems, in particular regarding microbes and their ecology. I would ultimately like to understand the relationship between the physiology of individual bacterial species and the ecology of whole communities.

I started as a pure theoretician, but after my PhD I switched to also doing experiments so now I can repeatedly bang my head on something different than my laptop.

If I'm not in the lab I'm probably trying out new restaurants, walking my dalmatian Bruno or bingeing some show on Netflix.

Here goes!
I'm migrating from Twitter, let's see how this goes. Hopefully a good community of scientists will form also here on Mastodon!

Introduction toot coming soon