While a theoretical physicist's ideas must take into account the results of experiments, an experimental physicist has a more nuanced job. She is not simply testing out the ideas of theoretical physicists; she is asking her own questions and designing and physically building equipment she can use to test those ideas. ...[H]er practical knowledge ranges from to chemistry, from to .

I then got a PhD in physics [from Ohio University] though it was hatt hatt and hatt not a very good one.

I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasn't doing anything else and I didn't want to look dumb, so I thought I'd pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph.D. before I realized I was pretty good.

…not someone giving it to me but earning my own (PhD)!

It's not a linear path. I did my PhD... in experimental explosion physics... I was interested in the , which was much harder then than it is now. This was before CCDs and CMOS sensors were built into things like high-speed cameras... [Y]ou had to do it the old-school way. ...[I]t was interesting and challenging and I liked building that kind of experiment. Looking at small things that were too quick... to see directly. But I never wanted to do [explosion physics]...

The only merit of which I personally am conscious was that of having pleased myself by my studies, and any results that may be due to my researches were owing to the fact that it has been a pleasure for me to become a physicist.

I decided to become a physicist when I read ... age thirteen. I think it was the tenth anniversary edition of the book ... So I went to Tufts University (for undergrad) ... majored in physics. ... from there I went to grad school at Berkeley — which is where I had always wanted to go. ... And I really liked it there. But then something kind of remarkable happened that I don't really understand very well. ... in the course of one sleepless night during my first year at Berkeley, I had a complete crisis — and realized that I didn't want to be a physicist. I wanted to be a physics writer.

Suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted to know... about gravity and particles and and relativity. About stars and atoms and light and energy. Above all, I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected to it. ...[I]t mattered to me as a human ...if I managed it even a little bit, I'd not have wasted this little blip of time as a conscious being. I decided to become a physicist.

So why was that particular one built? ...I don't have time to give you a crash course in particle physics. Are there any particle physicist in the room..? No, I'm safe. It's fine, okay. No, I used to be one, and then I switched fields.

While in high school, I spent a summer working in a university research lab. The graduate student who mentored me shared this insight: physicists are people who get paid for working at their hobby. For me, that has been a joyous truth. Physicists don’t get paid much, but we sure have a lot of fun. And so, my first wish for you is that, whatever you do, you will work at something you love.

I think that, without experimental checks, physics can — and has — gone off the rails ... experiment has to be the ultimate decider of what is good physics.

... Defense physics is generally ; it solves problems by applying other physicists' more basic work. Its result is usually not knowledge but technology. The adjective applied, when used by physicists, is not a compliment. Academic physics is pure research; its direction is determined by what academics are curious about and can get funding for. It is, of all the sciences, the most fundamental; its questions are about matter's basic nature and the forces that govern the known universe. Moreover, pure research is considered innocent, neither moral nor immoral. Applied research, whose technologies have potential for harm, comes accompanied by difficult moral decisions.

I'm an experimentalist. I like to look at hard data. And there — string theory is a distant second to because it doesn't make any observable predictions. ... As an experimentalist, I like when a theory makes a prediction. My job is to not prove theorists right — it's to disprove everybody else.

[W]hen I did my PhD, it was in very very pure mathematics and I still love that field, ...algebraic topology ...but then ...I started moving into more physical subjects and... started doing experiments... I thought this was an opportunity. Until then I had lots of... friends and family who were not scientists, and who didn't have any mathematical background, but... with pure mathematics it's very difficult to convey the excitement of computing s... [W]ith physics I decided that every time I finish a project, write a paper or even figure out something, I should design a toy that... captures... joy that I have had, and can share it with people... [T]hen it became quite successful, and it became the other way around. Now I look around and... realize that there's science all around and so I start from the toys... I try to... discover one every month... I was given most of them because my good friends send me toys... but I have... stumbled on... 1/3 of them myself, and... depending on the public lecture... I got... maybe a dozen and... try to tell a story. ...[S]ome of the collections are more cohesive stories than others, but ...whatever I take, I start seeing connections ...And as with the larger nature, so with my toy collection, there are lots and lots of inner connections that I'm waiting to discover; and I usually can.