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.
@LeoPaccianiMori Is that a common switch? My assumptions of physicists (scientists in general) was always that those 2 types were always born out of the individual's fundamental personality type.
@LeoPaccianiMori as in theoretical vs experimentation, that is.
@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
@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
@LeoPaccianiMori Yeah, that was the assumption I was making. I guess I assumed moving out of physics to another field, you would retain the same theoretical vs experimental mindset. Interesting that it's not the case, as much.
@LeoPaccianiMori Wow. Never really thought about it like that. Enlightening.
@LeoPaccianiMori But I guess I wouldn't know. I just read a lot of books in the field for leisure, I don't live the lifestyle.
@obi Glad I showed you something you didn't know about! 😀
@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)