We said farewell to a colleague earlier this week, a physicist who has decided to go to grad school. His boss was sorry to see him go, and not just because filling out the paperwork to hire someone new is a pain.

Anyway, the two physics PhD’s in attendance gave him some grad school advice: even if you desire to do experiments, don’t stop studying theory.

It’s common to divide physicists into two groups: theorists and experimentalists. But that’s not really true. The reality of physics research is that there are physicists who do theory, and physicists who do experiment and theory. Learning theory is unavoidable if you want to do experiments, because you have to understand what the experiment means and evaluate the data in terms of some model. I think the physicists who do experiments declare themselves as experimentalists because that’s what distinguishes them form someone who works solely on theory (and, to be fair, theory work by the theorists can go into more far depth with really hairy math and get just plain weird, as long as they don’t have to worry about how to come up with a test for it). The misconception the new student might have, that if s/he’s going to work in a lab then theory can be ignored, is a setup for difficulties down the road.