• Question: What is the scope of theoretical physics? Do theoretical physicists do pure research or both research and work as a professor?

    Asked by rajathjackson to Chris, Dave, David, Fiona, Jack on 22 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: David Freeborn

      David Freeborn answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      Hi rajathjackson,

      Yes, theoretical physicists do both pure research and work as a professor. That’s pretty much expected of everyone who moves up the academic ladder in Universities now.

      The scope of theoretical physics is very broad. I know some “biological” theoretical physicists for a start. Basically, any area of physics will have theorists involved in its work too, because all areas of physics need to be mathematically modelled.

      Most of theoretical physics today deals with understand field theories. A field can be thought of as a system with an “infinite” number of parts, usually extending all of space and time, but not always. Theoretical physics is often subdivided into three parts:
      Cosmology: dealing with the universe, black holes etc
      Particle physics: dealing with fields, strings, particles etc
      Condensed matter: which mostly deals with the behaviour of electrons and other “quasi particles” in crystals and other materials

      But it’s worth saying there are other areas too, and there’s a lot of crossover. What’s great is that the physics in all of these areas uses almost exactly the same equations.

      Wikipedia gives a pretty good overview here:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics

    • Photo: Jack Miller

      Jack Miller answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      David’s answer is pretty comprehensive here. What tends to happen is that you end up spending more time working on things that aren’t research as you go up the academic ladder — teaching, marking, writing grant applications, reading, writing and reviewing papers, and so on. In fact, most professors rarely do that much research in their own lab any more (though they often get others to test their ideas for them, at least in the experimental side of things). This is pretty true whether or not your research involves fields of the wheat or mathematical nature…

      Speaking of fields, David’s right — field theories have been developed that describe many, many different systems — from particles in free space to their behaviour in superconductors, to the behaviour of birds migrating around the world. Pretty handy!

    • Photo: Chris Mansell

      Chris Mansell answered on 23 Jun 2013:

      Hi rathajackson,

      Working as a professor of theoretical physicist involves more than just doing the research itself. Elaborating a little on what Jack has said, a professor would do things like:

      -teaching, including giving lectures to large classes of students, giving tutorials (i.e. classes where you go through example problems that the students have been set), setting exam papers, marking exam papers, possibly writing a physics textbook.

      -writing grant applications.

      – giving their expert opinions on grant applications that other theoretical physicists have written.

      – reading, writing and reviewing scientific papers.

      – giving talks to school kids who may be interested in learning more physics (which is known as outreach, which is what the five scientist here in the Quantum Zone of “I’m a scientist” are doing).

      Following on from the examples David has given has given, I can tell you a bit about the theoretical physicists who are interested in quantum computation. they typically don’t really mind from what the quantum computers are built (because atoms, ions, photons, superconductors, quantum dots, impurities in semiconductors, etc ultimately all follow the same laws of quantum physics). They spend their time designing ways in which a quantum computer could perform tasks more efficiently than ordinary computers.

      Some of these theorists specialise in quantum computers that have similarities to ordinary computers (e.g. instead of bits and logic gates, there are quantum bits and quantum logic gates). Some of them specialise in quantum computers where the parameters of the system are varied slowly compared to the relevant timescales of the system (which is known as adiabatic quantum computing). Some of them specialise in quantum computers where a very highly entangled state is created and then different components of the system are measured in different ways.

      Some quantum computer theorists spend their time trying to figure out what aspects of the theory of quantum mechanics are relevant to why quantum computers have advantages over ordinary computers. There have been some results that I find quite interesting about a property called quantum discord. This property was only defined in 2001 and only taken seriously in 2008. This is extremely recent considering that people have been thinking very carefully about entanglement since the mid-1930s. This type of work is very fundamental and really gets to the heart of some of the strangeness of quantum mechanics.

      Chris

Comments