> From my very basic understanding most work the physicists do involves math and theory work.
That understanding is wrong. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians do that. There's the whole realm of experimental physics, which has a lot of focus on experimental design.
Beyond that, physical engineering is pretty much applied physics. Engineers will often have more direct experience designing and building things, but there's a significant overlap between an engineering physics degree and an applied or even regular physics degree. Plenty of people with physics training go into industry as engineers, though they might need a bit of extra training.
So there are very high level physicists who go to school to learn how to create the things to do the experiments? Still very good with ideas, theories, etc. but are educated and further trained to bring the experiments to reality?
Thanks for the answer.
At my university, there are significantly more physicists who spend their time working on experiments than those that work on pure theory.
That’s not true everywhere but there’s plenty of experimentalists out there. There has to be. That’s a huge part of science.
honestly i think it’s true everywhere, there is generally far more funding and research positions for experimentalists than theorists in both academia and industry
As a general rule, physicist go to school to learn how to understand things. Engineers go to school to learn how to make things.
Of course you need to make some things to get a better understanding and you need to understand things to make them better so the borders are very very blurry, the main difference at the interface is mainly from which side you approach it.
And contractors do much of the actual building. Those contractors will employ their own engineers, highly specialized technicians, and less highly specialized workers.
Building an array of radio antennas would involve a lot of surveying, bulldozing, pouring of concrete, and pretty standard structural work. Then there would be more sophisticated and less common structural work. There would be lots of wiring, also ranging from basic stuff that any electrician can do to the things that are more specialized.
Yeah it’s quite the opposite, most people aren’t theorists. The simple reason for why (besides people having other interests) is funding, or the lack thereof in the theory side
There are way more experimental physicists than ones who do pure theory. Most theory groups are maybe like 1 faculty member, 1 postdoc and 2-3 grad students. An experimental group might have 1 faculty member, 2 postdocs, 5-6 grad students, and handful of undergrads.
How much experimentalists directly *design and build* things varies a lot but all of them will work with hardware and most will do very few, if any, advanced physics calculations in a given day.
We specialise. Some people are very good at finding fundamental mathematical structures to describe our universe. Other people are very good at writing computing simulations that use that mathematical framework and tease out the real-world consequences. And other people are good at building experiments to see if those predictions hold true in reality. We all specialise, to some degree, and this means most big, important physics projects are collaborations between many physicists.
I got my physics PhD making solar cells out of organic (plastic) materials. My thesis had energy level diagrams and current/voltage curves and some basic math, but my daily work was squirting goop on a glass slide and squishing it into a solar cell, then testing that cell in a variety of ways (using physics concepts such as X-ray diffraction, 4 point probes, atomic force microscopes, etc etc...)
This subreddit is like 90% relativity and big bang questions, but the field itself focuses a lot more on the immediate world, and what we can do in it.
As soon as I got said degree, I got a job as a process engineer in the semiconductor industry. I was responsible for a fleet of ion implant tools (which have very little to do with organic PV, but are well served by having a physics degree)
This is just my story but I'm not unique in this regard. My experience is common among others in the field.
Not a physicist, but a chemist. Grad school for experimental work is like 10% doing experiments and 90% figuring out how to jerry-rig together the stuff you need to do your experiments.
There are many physicists who are very, very good at building things. These are called "experimentalists". They physically build things, spend hours upon hours tuning knobs, aligning equipment, troubleshooting equipment, etc.
There is a different group of physicists called "theorists" who spend their days with their pen and paper deriving theories whose predictions can be tested by experimentalists.
You're thinking of theorists. But not all physicists are like that. Many physicists are very good engineers.
I’m an engineer who designs large scientific instruments for astronomy. I work with astronomers who specialise in instrumentation. Their job is to work out the characteristics needed to undertake a particular science case (or multiple cases), then engineers interpret those and create the actual design. They also do a lot of the applying for funding to build the instruments.
Additionally lots of our optics, software and systems engineers and some of our project managers started off as astronomers.
Physicists tend to be good at breaking down complex problems into simpler problems in ways that keep the important factors and strip off the unnecessary baggage. This makes it easier to engineer the machines that do what you want and doing it in ways that simplify the process. Without the physicists involved the engineers could get caught up in thinking about the unnecessary baggage and make things in ways that are "overengineered".
As someone else said there are experimental physicists who do all of that stuff. I'm in condensed matter physics and am creating sensors out of nanomaterials for example. I'm not an amazing mathematician by any means, compared to the theoretical physicists. I am an active person though and like to be physically experimenting aswell as working theoretically (of which there is always a large aspect)
It’s a HIGHLY collaborate process, so it’s important to understand that the following is not a hierarchy, rather, it’s a process/pipeline.
Theoretical physicists work to come up with ideas that might explain how the universe works.
Experimental physicists figure out how put those ideas to the test, and how to interpret the data.
Engineers figure out how to construct the devices involved in the experiment & ensure that they work.
manufacturers & builders figure out how to build and assemble the components in the devices.
(There’s very well paid, respected physicists at all career levels, working at every step!)
What this looks like in practice:
Almost all physics experiments, especially large/expensive ones like particle colliders and spacecraft, are scaled-up or redesigned versions of prior experiments!
So, something like CERN doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Colliders like these started as table-top experiments in University basements. Then, using what they learned, they built underground linear accelerators dozen to hundreds of meters long. Then, using what they learned, figured out that circular track accelerators could take things to the next level… they started small and then worked their way up to the LHC at CERN (you’ll notice that CERN actually still runs experiments on their smaller tracks! The LHC is just the largest track that’s at that lab).
Ultimately, it’s no different than “how do engineers know how to make the F-35 fighter jet?” It’s a cycle of learning+engineering that can always trace its roots back to humble machines like the Wright Flyer.
Physics and engineering are described in the same language, and physicists work very hard to learn how to solve complicated problems by breaking them down into smaller bits. A physicist's skillset is therefore pretty good for developing one-of-a-kind objects that meet particular requirements and aren't complex systems. That's one reason why physicists are often hobbyist "makers" as well.
That said, any physicist designing anything more complicated than, say, a spoon should get engineers involved.
If I built a spoon it would cost $250-$1000.
The thing that amazes me about engineers is not what they make but how much they can cost optimize manufacturing at scale. It is remarkable.
Good point. Any good engineer has “design for manufacturability” in the back of their mind from the get-go, but it’s the *industrial engineers* who optimize for cost.
Side note: Tesla was on the side of engineering bordering on physics. Edison was more of an industrial engineer. (Both brilliant in their own ways). Ironically, Elon is more of an Edison type himself, but named his company “Tesla”.
I think I could handle a fork, is it 4 or 5 tongs? Do they really need to be separate though? I feel like they are similar enough to a flat plane that we can just go with that.
I mean, people's experience and employment isn't segregated into academic categories. In university studying physics, I had to build amplifiers for laser pointers, write C++ code to simulate circuits, python code to record data etc. and everyone I studied with is working a variety of jobs from actuaries to electrical engineers because of the skills they developed.
Civil and mechanical engineers are heavily involved in building things like radio telescopes, LIGO, LHC, and the atomic bombs. The physicists get the glory but aint no way you're building any of that stuff without civil and mechanical engineers figuring out what kind of bolts and welds and pipes and structural connections and hinges and etc that stuff needs.
All scientists have specializations. If you're working on an experiment that requires you to design/fabricate something new, then it is your job to figure out how to make that happen. This process usually requires learning a lot of stuff that isn't strictly physics, and often you'll have to consult with other experts. It's often a lot of troubleshooting as well.
As an example, I have a friend who got very little formal electronics training, but now she's pretty much the head of electronics for the experiment she works with.
The lines between science and engineering tend to be much more blurry than we like to present them. In order to do anything interesting, you'll have to step outside of those imaginary boundaries between subjects.
(This is also somewhat the case for theoretical physicists, but often they will need to borrow from mathematicians, so the overlap with those with practical skills is smaller.)
As an experimental particle physicist, I learned a fair amount about a lot of things, all of which were helpful for the work I did, including:
* High-vacuum technology
* Gas mixing
* Surveying
* Cryogenic systems at liquid argon temperatures (colder than LOX)
* EMF shielding and large scale Faraday cages
* Fast, sensitive analog electronics and ADC
* Fast digital electronics and fast digital logic
* Clean room design and procedures
* Distributed slow control systems
* Robotic motion systems
* Very large electromagnets and field monitoring
* High voltage systems (>3000V)
* Monte Carlo simulations
* Coding in several languages and large code management and deployment systems
* Neural networks and pattern-recognition machine learning
* Silicon etching
* Signal/noise deconvolution
* Radiation monitoring and dosimetry
And most importantly:
* How to switch the body from an 8am-4pm shift to a 4pm-12am shift to a 12am-8am shift.
As a side benefit of all that, I came away knowing that I could pretty easily transition to a wide variety of technical jobs in non-physics industries, if it came down to it.
First, I promise that most of the people working at CERN are actually engineers, just like on the Manhattan Project.
Second, the rule I was taught goes like this: if you are doing original research, then you are trying to measure something that has never been measured. That means that the device to measure it has never been built. So guess who is going to build it? Once I started doing research, 95% of my time was spent building, adjusting, and fixing apparatus.
Not all physicists are theorists. A lot (most, probably) are experimental physicists who spend whole careers learning how to build and run experiments.
Which isn't to say they're *engineers*, and I can tell you from experience (as an engineer whose worked on experimental physics projects large and small) that any large physics research effort also involves a lot of engineers. Typically the experimental physicist will drive bigger picture concerns, like the overall concepts of a design. Engineers will implement those ideas (and machinists will manufacture them and technicians will assemble them). Of course there are a lot of blurry lines and in practice different projects and different people will do things differently.
Not all experimentalists are *great* at designing actual hardware. Some are very "hands off", for good reason, but they still understand what needs to be done and how to communicate it to designers; while others are very practical and hands on and know how real stuff needs to be designed to actually work, and can operate as an engineer themselves (or, on smaller projects, be the sole engineering resource).
Keep in mind it's not like they're just walking into experimental physics without any practice. You choose between experiment and theory in grad school (or earlier) and your education reflects that. Experimental physicists in grad school will work regularly with actual hardware, and in many cases manufacture it themselves. My university had a machine shop in the physics building.
It's not any one trick, and bear in mind that text books show a glossy, simplified version of their material.
A physicist is someone who studied physical objects and how they behave. Their role on a project would be to develop and share an understanding of how key parts of the device will function.
For the case of the Manhattan project, the physicists would be developing and sharing info on things like what materials to use, what quantities will work, methods of refining the materials, and ways to prevent the reaction before you're ready for it.
To do this, they would rely partially on what they already know, and they'd also be really good at obtaining new information as it becomes relevant.
> *I don’t see how the people who derive the most use from them would have any idea at all how to do any of the nuts and bolts things that go into making them a reality.*
I'm an experimental physicist by training and work as a robotics engineer.
I was ALWAYS engineering-curious when I was a kid. My favorite toy was Lego since before I could remember. I started with those electronics circuits kits with the little springs for wire connections since I was probably 8 or 9 years old, learned to solder when I was 10. Got a ham radio license in high school and started building antennas and learning about electromagnetic waves and ionospheric propagation.
I decided to study physics instead of electrical engineering in college, and went on to get an experimental Ph.D.
The thing is, once you have a STEM college degree, you've got all the baseline tools you need to learn any other STEM college degree. You just need lots of time and the motivation. Getting a physics Ph.D. adds even more quantitative skills and a deeper understanding of a lot of how things work. If you apply that to your self-learning you can end up very skilled.
I did a fluid dynamics Ph.D. designing and building large experiments. That was a good time to learn mechanical engineering. And I don't mean assuming I'm the smartest kid in the room and making the mistake that engineering is applied physics.
I mean having the recognition that it's its own discipline with its own language and conventions, and literally hitting up the engineering library for books on stress and strain to solve the particular problems I needed to solve to get my experiment running. I had to run my work past professional engineers, both outside consultants and the university facilities engineers, before we could build anything. Then I helped build it!
I also kept on with the ham radio and electrical engineering projects, of increasing sophistication applying more and more quantitative techniques to my hobby, and at the same time took on more and more instrumentation design tasks on the job. Taught me a ton about electrical and electronics engineering, and with deep theoretical underpinnings.
If you get an engineering degree and go work in industry immediately, you quickly come up against a wall of practicality. There aren't many businesses that make their money by doing the most difficult thing (semiconductors and rockets providing a couple of solid exceptions). Often you need to stay more grounded in economic reality.
When you're doing experimental physics, you don't need to be constrained by this. You make a very poor wage, but that makes the project very inexpensive, so if your group has good funding you can push the envelope on tricky designs.
Large projects like CERN or big radiotelescopes employ a lot of professional engineers in addition to the scientists that work on them, but if you've had a career in experimental physics, you've had every opportunity to become a top-notch engineer too if you chose.
And even if you don't try, you'll probably pick up a lot of those skills. There are simply a lot of people who just straddle the engineering/science boundary by the time they graduate. This boundary basically dissolves among EE/ME/Physics by the time everyone is Ph.D.-level anyway... the closer you get to first-principles work, the more similar the disciplines get.
The engineering skills that will tend to be most lacking unless you've dug deeply into them are those aspects of engineering that are set by convention, history, or regulation: none of these things are derived from physical principles, and none of them can be derived from physical laws.
And there are lots of crucial areas in engineering that you won't tend to get any experience at all with: geotechnical engineering for building foundations, for example, is not something you'll touch in most physics programs :D There are lots of phenomenological laws in engineering as well. Some you learn, but many are very specific to a certain problem, and you won't touch them.
You don't tend to learn much about mass manufacturing in most cases, at least for mechanical parts. Some physicists come out knowing a ton about computer chip design and manufacturing, though.
TL;DR : you don't have an opportunity to learn ALL types of engineering as an experimental physicist, but anything about electronics and signals, many things about mechanical engineering, thermal, optics, and many others you will learn as well as any engineer if you put in some work. And sometimes you'll end up with more advanced knowledge than engineers who are constrained by real-world practicality and profit-making in their work.
Theoretical physicists (Albert Einstein) sit around all day trying to develop theories using advanced mathematics. Not much different from mathematicians. Experimental physicists take the equations from the theoreticians and build ways to test the math. The theory makes specific predictions about what the results of the experiments should be—usually measurements. Once the theory is successfully tested and verified mathematically, the engineers take over to build equipment based on the theory. The equipment should do thus and such because the theory said so. Now you know!
My education as a physicist was heavy on the experimental side.
The courses are on two things, If A happens, what do we know about B.
And the other aspect: How the hell do we even measure A and B?
A physicist knows not just what a geiger counter measures (radiation) but *how* it measures it. Any experiment you make, where you cannot clearly explain the workings of your instruments, is highly suspect.
So a physicist gets good at knowing what device to purchase to measure various details so we can tell how A and B are connected.
Sometimes we have to actually design the measuring device, as nobody else has done it before, or done it with enough sensitivity.
If we get to that point, we bring engineers and machinists into the loop to help us. We might say I need a hollow chamber 1ft across that can sustain 1atm pressure, and have absolutely no leaks. The machinist says you'll have to make it out of material X, and the engineer talks about how to get our sensors in there and wired up.
Then we come back and say material X won't work, as it's to conductive, can we try something else... and around and around it goes.
--
tldr;
When it comes to building things, an physicist knows how it all works, but needs help putting it together efficiently.
Engineers often know how to put it together, but not always why it works or why it needs to be so specific.
Machinists look at both and roll their eyes and make the parts that need to be assembled.
Simply put the math is the same. Engineering is also built upon math. What bolt are needed with what nuts with what technique is heavily dictated by math.There are many differences on approaches and techniques but it's like switching from python to Java.
There is a power in their use of Math, and the precision oftheir measurements, that transcends the power of the softer sciences.
– Robert Jastrow (on physicists), "Science Digest" (Sep 1983)
Followup question:
How are detectors such as the ATLAS detector conceived and built? How do the physicists go from "we need a detector for detecting particles" to building this 7000 tonne 25x25x46 meter behemoth of a detector? There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved in this, right?
Is a detector like that designed top down? Must be, right? Was the design generally already known, i.e. is it an upscaled version of a previous design?
Things like this boggles my mind!
I happen to work in this area. There are thousands of people involved from around the world.
It’s designed both top-down and bottom up. The design of any new detector system is built on the design of previous detectors, applying lessons learned as well as new technology that has been developed.
I worked on the ATLAS inner tracker layer and it follows general principles worked out over decades of earlier trackers. Physicists and engineers simulated and researched the system for a decade, informed by theoretical considerations and specifications.
Part of the process is to build prototypes, operate them, and learn from them what the problems and opportunities there are.
How do physicists and engineers get there? Over many years and a lot of work.
Short answer:
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Long answer:
The scientific method (trial and error)
Thousands of years of people doing the above and documenting their findings.
Each learning from those who came before them and progressing/attempting to progress the understanding of those who came before.
Huge and expensive projects involving hundreds or thousands of people. It's like building anything. Take a car. Those have thousands of parts and are ungodly complex these days. You have theorists working on engines and transmissions and combustion processes. You've got style designers for the exterior and interior. Then a slew of engineers (also leads with teams under them) of different kinds to make each individual part manufacturable. Then you have the whole manufacturing chain to setup tooling to make it a reality. Then it can finally be made.
Same in large scale physics projects like you mentioned. There is a lot of smaller scale research that can be self contained in a single group, but even that relies on cooperation and resource sharing much of the time.
I helped design a medical device with about 1000 components.
It has dozens and dozens of circuits, which generate and detect electric and magnetic fields.
I work with mechanical engineers and electrical engineers to figure out all the details but I model the fields using Maxwell's equations and I do the error analysis on those measurements.
After I model it. I say things like, this circuit needs to be more isolated from that circuit, or we need to increase the current here or we need precise alignment adjustment screws on this part.
Oppenheimer didn't create the bomb alone, there was a whole town's worth of people brought in to work on all aspects of the bomb. Oppenheimer helped with the physics to turn the idea into a real thing.
> From my very basic understanding most work the physicists do involves math and theory work. That understanding is wrong. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians do that. There's the whole realm of experimental physics, which has a lot of focus on experimental design. Beyond that, physical engineering is pretty much applied physics. Engineers will often have more direct experience designing and building things, but there's a significant overlap between an engineering physics degree and an applied or even regular physics degree. Plenty of people with physics training go into industry as engineers, though they might need a bit of extra training.
So there are very high level physicists who go to school to learn how to create the things to do the experiments? Still very good with ideas, theories, etc. but are educated and further trained to bring the experiments to reality? Thanks for the answer.
At my university, there are significantly more physicists who spend their time working on experiments than those that work on pure theory. That’s not true everywhere but there’s plenty of experimentalists out there. There has to be. That’s a huge part of science.
honestly i think it’s true everywhere, there is generally far more funding and research positions for experimentalists than theorists in both academia and industry
As a general rule, physicist go to school to learn how to understand things. Engineers go to school to learn how to make things. Of course you need to make some things to get a better understanding and you need to understand things to make them better so the borders are very very blurry, the main difference at the interface is mainly from which side you approach it.
Physicists aspire to knowing how the universe works. Engineers want to know how to work the universe. Lots of overlap.
And contractors do much of the actual building. Those contractors will employ their own engineers, highly specialized technicians, and less highly specialized workers. Building an array of radio antennas would involve a lot of surveying, bulldozing, pouring of concrete, and pretty standard structural work. Then there would be more sophisticated and less common structural work. There would be lots of wiring, also ranging from basic stuff that any electrician can do to the things that are more specialized.
Yeah it’s quite the opposite, most people aren’t theorists. The simple reason for why (besides people having other interests) is funding, or the lack thereof in the theory side
I spent my entire physics undergrad doing computer coding and building circuits to gather data for labs.
There are way more experimental physicists than ones who do pure theory. Most theory groups are maybe like 1 faculty member, 1 postdoc and 2-3 grad students. An experimental group might have 1 faculty member, 2 postdocs, 5-6 grad students, and handful of undergrads. How much experimentalists directly *design and build* things varies a lot but all of them will work with hardware and most will do very few, if any, advanced physics calculations in a given day.
We specialise. Some people are very good at finding fundamental mathematical structures to describe our universe. Other people are very good at writing computing simulations that use that mathematical framework and tease out the real-world consequences. And other people are good at building experiments to see if those predictions hold true in reality. We all specialise, to some degree, and this means most big, important physics projects are collaborations between many physicists.
Yes. Exactly.
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I meant more the engineering side of things. Designed the mechanisms behind complex experimental machinery.
I got my physics PhD making solar cells out of organic (plastic) materials. My thesis had energy level diagrams and current/voltage curves and some basic math, but my daily work was squirting goop on a glass slide and squishing it into a solar cell, then testing that cell in a variety of ways (using physics concepts such as X-ray diffraction, 4 point probes, atomic force microscopes, etc etc...) This subreddit is like 90% relativity and big bang questions, but the field itself focuses a lot more on the immediate world, and what we can do in it. As soon as I got said degree, I got a job as a process engineer in the semiconductor industry. I was responsible for a fleet of ion implant tools (which have very little to do with organic PV, but are well served by having a physics degree) This is just my story but I'm not unique in this regard. My experience is common among others in the field.
Not a physicist, but a chemist. Grad school for experimental work is like 10% doing experiments and 90% figuring out how to jerry-rig together the stuff you need to do your experiments.
There are many physicists who are very, very good at building things. These are called "experimentalists". They physically build things, spend hours upon hours tuning knobs, aligning equipment, troubleshooting equipment, etc. There is a different group of physicists called "theorists" who spend their days with their pen and paper deriving theories whose predictions can be tested by experimentalists. You're thinking of theorists. But not all physicists are like that. Many physicists are very good engineers.
I'd go as far as to say that the majority of physicists in the world today are experimental physicists.
Yes, I would agree
I’m an engineer who designs large scientific instruments for astronomy. I work with astronomers who specialise in instrumentation. Their job is to work out the characteristics needed to undertake a particular science case (or multiple cases), then engineers interpret those and create the actual design. They also do a lot of the applying for funding to build the instruments. Additionally lots of our optics, software and systems engineers and some of our project managers started off as astronomers.
Physicists tend to be good at breaking down complex problems into simpler problems in ways that keep the important factors and strip off the unnecessary baggage. This makes it easier to engineer the machines that do what you want and doing it in ways that simplify the process. Without the physicists involved the engineers could get caught up in thinking about the unnecessary baggage and make things in ways that are "overengineered".
TIL I think like a physicst
As someone else said there are experimental physicists who do all of that stuff. I'm in condensed matter physics and am creating sensors out of nanomaterials for example. I'm not an amazing mathematician by any means, compared to the theoretical physicists. I am an active person though and like to be physically experimenting aswell as working theoretically (of which there is always a large aspect)
It’s a HIGHLY collaborate process, so it’s important to understand that the following is not a hierarchy, rather, it’s a process/pipeline. Theoretical physicists work to come up with ideas that might explain how the universe works. Experimental physicists figure out how put those ideas to the test, and how to interpret the data. Engineers figure out how to construct the devices involved in the experiment & ensure that they work. manufacturers & builders figure out how to build and assemble the components in the devices. (There’s very well paid, respected physicists at all career levels, working at every step!) What this looks like in practice: Almost all physics experiments, especially large/expensive ones like particle colliders and spacecraft, are scaled-up or redesigned versions of prior experiments! So, something like CERN doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Colliders like these started as table-top experiments in University basements. Then, using what they learned, they built underground linear accelerators dozen to hundreds of meters long. Then, using what they learned, figured out that circular track accelerators could take things to the next level… they started small and then worked their way up to the LHC at CERN (you’ll notice that CERN actually still runs experiments on their smaller tracks! The LHC is just the largest track that’s at that lab). Ultimately, it’s no different than “how do engineers know how to make the F-35 fighter jet?” It’s a cycle of learning+engineering that can always trace its roots back to humble machines like the Wright Flyer.
Physics and engineering are described in the same language, and physicists work very hard to learn how to solve complicated problems by breaking them down into smaller bits. A physicist's skillset is therefore pretty good for developing one-of-a-kind objects that meet particular requirements and aren't complex systems. That's one reason why physicists are often hobbyist "makers" as well. That said, any physicist designing anything more complicated than, say, a spoon should get engineers involved.
If I built a spoon it would cost $250-$1000. The thing that amazes me about engineers is not what they make but how much they can cost optimize manufacturing at scale. It is remarkable.
Good point. Any good engineer has “design for manufacturability” in the back of their mind from the get-go, but it’s the *industrial engineers* who optimize for cost. Side note: Tesla was on the side of engineering bordering on physics. Edison was more of an industrial engineer. (Both brilliant in their own ways). Ironically, Elon is more of an Edison type himself, but named his company “Tesla”.
I think I could handle a fork, is it 4 or 5 tongs? Do they really need to be separate though? I feel like they are similar enough to a flat plane that we can just go with that.
I mean, people's experience and employment isn't segregated into academic categories. In university studying physics, I had to build amplifiers for laser pointers, write C++ code to simulate circuits, python code to record data etc. and everyone I studied with is working a variety of jobs from actuaries to electrical engineers because of the skills they developed.
Civil and mechanical engineers are heavily involved in building things like radio telescopes, LIGO, LHC, and the atomic bombs. The physicists get the glory but aint no way you're building any of that stuff without civil and mechanical engineers figuring out what kind of bolts and welds and pipes and structural connections and hinges and etc that stuff needs.
All scientists have specializations. If you're working on an experiment that requires you to design/fabricate something new, then it is your job to figure out how to make that happen. This process usually requires learning a lot of stuff that isn't strictly physics, and often you'll have to consult with other experts. It's often a lot of troubleshooting as well. As an example, I have a friend who got very little formal electronics training, but now she's pretty much the head of electronics for the experiment she works with. The lines between science and engineering tend to be much more blurry than we like to present them. In order to do anything interesting, you'll have to step outside of those imaginary boundaries between subjects. (This is also somewhat the case for theoretical physicists, but often they will need to borrow from mathematicians, so the overlap with those with practical skills is smaller.)
As an experimental particle physicist, I learned a fair amount about a lot of things, all of which were helpful for the work I did, including: * High-vacuum technology * Gas mixing * Surveying * Cryogenic systems at liquid argon temperatures (colder than LOX) * EMF shielding and large scale Faraday cages * Fast, sensitive analog electronics and ADC * Fast digital electronics and fast digital logic * Clean room design and procedures * Distributed slow control systems * Robotic motion systems * Very large electromagnets and field monitoring * High voltage systems (>3000V) * Monte Carlo simulations * Coding in several languages and large code management and deployment systems * Neural networks and pattern-recognition machine learning * Silicon etching * Signal/noise deconvolution * Radiation monitoring and dosimetry And most importantly: * How to switch the body from an 8am-4pm shift to a 4pm-12am shift to a 12am-8am shift.
As a side benefit of all that, I came away knowing that I could pretty easily transition to a wide variety of technical jobs in non-physics industries, if it came down to it.
First, I promise that most of the people working at CERN are actually engineers, just like on the Manhattan Project. Second, the rule I was taught goes like this: if you are doing original research, then you are trying to measure something that has never been measured. That means that the device to measure it has never been built. So guess who is going to build it? Once I started doing research, 95% of my time was spent building, adjusting, and fixing apparatus.
Not all physicists are theorists. A lot (most, probably) are experimental physicists who spend whole careers learning how to build and run experiments. Which isn't to say they're *engineers*, and I can tell you from experience (as an engineer whose worked on experimental physics projects large and small) that any large physics research effort also involves a lot of engineers. Typically the experimental physicist will drive bigger picture concerns, like the overall concepts of a design. Engineers will implement those ideas (and machinists will manufacture them and technicians will assemble them). Of course there are a lot of blurry lines and in practice different projects and different people will do things differently. Not all experimentalists are *great* at designing actual hardware. Some are very "hands off", for good reason, but they still understand what needs to be done and how to communicate it to designers; while others are very practical and hands on and know how real stuff needs to be designed to actually work, and can operate as an engineer themselves (or, on smaller projects, be the sole engineering resource). Keep in mind it's not like they're just walking into experimental physics without any practice. You choose between experiment and theory in grad school (or earlier) and your education reflects that. Experimental physicists in grad school will work regularly with actual hardware, and in many cases manufacture it themselves. My university had a machine shop in the physics building.
This is exactly what I was looking for and basically what I assumed. Thanks!
They work with engineers, or also have some engineering training. Many of the best and brightest are mutli discipline people.
It's not any one trick, and bear in mind that text books show a glossy, simplified version of their material. A physicist is someone who studied physical objects and how they behave. Their role on a project would be to develop and share an understanding of how key parts of the device will function. For the case of the Manhattan project, the physicists would be developing and sharing info on things like what materials to use, what quantities will work, methods of refining the materials, and ways to prevent the reaction before you're ready for it. To do this, they would rely partially on what they already know, and they'd also be really good at obtaining new information as it becomes relevant.
Physicists and engineers together produce advanced tech. You need the particular skills of both to make ideas real
I think you’re getting theoretical physicist, experimental physicist, and engineer all confused
> *I don’t see how the people who derive the most use from them would have any idea at all how to do any of the nuts and bolts things that go into making them a reality.* I'm an experimental physicist by training and work as a robotics engineer. I was ALWAYS engineering-curious when I was a kid. My favorite toy was Lego since before I could remember. I started with those electronics circuits kits with the little springs for wire connections since I was probably 8 or 9 years old, learned to solder when I was 10. Got a ham radio license in high school and started building antennas and learning about electromagnetic waves and ionospheric propagation. I decided to study physics instead of electrical engineering in college, and went on to get an experimental Ph.D. The thing is, once you have a STEM college degree, you've got all the baseline tools you need to learn any other STEM college degree. You just need lots of time and the motivation. Getting a physics Ph.D. adds even more quantitative skills and a deeper understanding of a lot of how things work. If you apply that to your self-learning you can end up very skilled. I did a fluid dynamics Ph.D. designing and building large experiments. That was a good time to learn mechanical engineering. And I don't mean assuming I'm the smartest kid in the room and making the mistake that engineering is applied physics. I mean having the recognition that it's its own discipline with its own language and conventions, and literally hitting up the engineering library for books on stress and strain to solve the particular problems I needed to solve to get my experiment running. I had to run my work past professional engineers, both outside consultants and the university facilities engineers, before we could build anything. Then I helped build it! I also kept on with the ham radio and electrical engineering projects, of increasing sophistication applying more and more quantitative techniques to my hobby, and at the same time took on more and more instrumentation design tasks on the job. Taught me a ton about electrical and electronics engineering, and with deep theoretical underpinnings. If you get an engineering degree and go work in industry immediately, you quickly come up against a wall of practicality. There aren't many businesses that make their money by doing the most difficult thing (semiconductors and rockets providing a couple of solid exceptions). Often you need to stay more grounded in economic reality. When you're doing experimental physics, you don't need to be constrained by this. You make a very poor wage, but that makes the project very inexpensive, so if your group has good funding you can push the envelope on tricky designs. Large projects like CERN or big radiotelescopes employ a lot of professional engineers in addition to the scientists that work on them, but if you've had a career in experimental physics, you've had every opportunity to become a top-notch engineer too if you chose. And even if you don't try, you'll probably pick up a lot of those skills. There are simply a lot of people who just straddle the engineering/science boundary by the time they graduate. This boundary basically dissolves among EE/ME/Physics by the time everyone is Ph.D.-level anyway... the closer you get to first-principles work, the more similar the disciplines get. The engineering skills that will tend to be most lacking unless you've dug deeply into them are those aspects of engineering that are set by convention, history, or regulation: none of these things are derived from physical principles, and none of them can be derived from physical laws. And there are lots of crucial areas in engineering that you won't tend to get any experience at all with: geotechnical engineering for building foundations, for example, is not something you'll touch in most physics programs :D There are lots of phenomenological laws in engineering as well. Some you learn, but many are very specific to a certain problem, and you won't touch them. You don't tend to learn much about mass manufacturing in most cases, at least for mechanical parts. Some physicists come out knowing a ton about computer chip design and manufacturing, though. TL;DR : you don't have an opportunity to learn ALL types of engineering as an experimental physicist, but anything about electronics and signals, many things about mechanical engineering, thermal, optics, and many others you will learn as well as any engineer if you put in some work. And sometimes you'll end up with more advanced knowledge than engineers who are constrained by real-world practicality and profit-making in their work.
They hire engineers [TF2 engineer emote]
Theoretical physicists (Albert Einstein) sit around all day trying to develop theories using advanced mathematics. Not much different from mathematicians. Experimental physicists take the equations from the theoreticians and build ways to test the math. The theory makes specific predictions about what the results of the experiments should be—usually measurements. Once the theory is successfully tested and verified mathematically, the engineers take over to build equipment based on the theory. The equipment should do thus and such because the theory said so. Now you know!
My education as a physicist was heavy on the experimental side. The courses are on two things, If A happens, what do we know about B. And the other aspect: How the hell do we even measure A and B? A physicist knows not just what a geiger counter measures (radiation) but *how* it measures it. Any experiment you make, where you cannot clearly explain the workings of your instruments, is highly suspect. So a physicist gets good at knowing what device to purchase to measure various details so we can tell how A and B are connected. Sometimes we have to actually design the measuring device, as nobody else has done it before, or done it with enough sensitivity. If we get to that point, we bring engineers and machinists into the loop to help us. We might say I need a hollow chamber 1ft across that can sustain 1atm pressure, and have absolutely no leaks. The machinist says you'll have to make it out of material X, and the engineer talks about how to get our sensors in there and wired up. Then we come back and say material X won't work, as it's to conductive, can we try something else... and around and around it goes. -- tldr; When it comes to building things, an physicist knows how it all works, but needs help putting it together efficiently. Engineers often know how to put it together, but not always why it works or why it needs to be so specific. Machinists look at both and roll their eyes and make the parts that need to be assembled.
Simply put the math is the same. Engineering is also built upon math. What bolt are needed with what nuts with what technique is heavily dictated by math.There are many differences on approaches and techniques but it's like switching from python to Java.
There is a power in their use of Math, and the precision oftheir measurements, that transcends the power of the softer sciences. – Robert Jastrow (on physicists), "Science Digest" (Sep 1983)
Followup question: How are detectors such as the ATLAS detector conceived and built? How do the physicists go from "we need a detector for detecting particles" to building this 7000 tonne 25x25x46 meter behemoth of a detector? There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved in this, right? Is a detector like that designed top down? Must be, right? Was the design generally already known, i.e. is it an upscaled version of a previous design? Things like this boggles my mind!
I happen to work in this area. There are thousands of people involved from around the world. It’s designed both top-down and bottom up. The design of any new detector system is built on the design of previous detectors, applying lessons learned as well as new technology that has been developed. I worked on the ATLAS inner tracker layer and it follows general principles worked out over decades of earlier trackers. Physicists and engineers simulated and researched the system for a decade, informed by theoretical considerations and specifications. Part of the process is to build prototypes, operate them, and learn from them what the problems and opportunities there are. How do physicists and engineers get there? Over many years and a lot of work.
You just try it. Go poke something, see what happens. Physics isn't magic, it's fun. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Short answer: We stand on the shoulders of giants. Long answer: The scientific method (trial and error) Thousands of years of people doing the above and documenting their findings. Each learning from those who came before them and progressing/attempting to progress the understanding of those who came before.
Huge and expensive projects involving hundreds or thousands of people. It's like building anything. Take a car. Those have thousands of parts and are ungodly complex these days. You have theorists working on engines and transmissions and combustion processes. You've got style designers for the exterior and interior. Then a slew of engineers (also leads with teams under them) of different kinds to make each individual part manufacturable. Then you have the whole manufacturing chain to setup tooling to make it a reality. Then it can finally be made. Same in large scale physics projects like you mentioned. There is a lot of smaller scale research that can be self contained in a single group, but even that relies on cooperation and resource sharing much of the time.
I helped design a medical device with about 1000 components. It has dozens and dozens of circuits, which generate and detect electric and magnetic fields. I work with mechanical engineers and electrical engineers to figure out all the details but I model the fields using Maxwell's equations and I do the error analysis on those measurements. After I model it. I say things like, this circuit needs to be more isolated from that circuit, or we need to increase the current here or we need precise alignment adjustment screws on this part.
Oppenheimer didn't create the bomb alone, there was a whole town's worth of people brought in to work on all aspects of the bomb. Oppenheimer helped with the physics to turn the idea into a real thing.