Question: Would you change your chosen specialsm if you could?

Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 23 Jun 2014:

Absolutely not!! I do what I find the absolutely most fascinating research possible. I mean, lets face it, it’s the very birth of the Universe we are talking about 😉 !
I get to think about things like time travel, causality, black holes, worm holes, extra dimensions of space, the quantum weirdness of the Universe, dark energy, and many other cool things almost every day! I get to play with the laws of nature, and test what would happen if we were to change them!

(I’m joking, everybody’s research is actually really cool! Often I think I just wouldn’t have the patience to do it myself !)

I’m doing all these things, but really everyday I have the choice of just changing direction and doing something different. I could start working on the sun, or very distant galaxies tomorrow if I wanted to! I had a professor who did his PhD looking at particle physics theories, and now he is building a telescope at the South Pole! I have a friend who was a string theorist, and now she is doing a postdoc in biology (in something I don’t understand enough to explain here…!!!)

Aimee is absolutely right, the great thing about being a physicist is that we learn how to be good researchers, good thinkers, we learnt how to ask the right questions (that looks easy, but often that’s the hardest bit to do!!), so we can change speciality very easily. The learning curve can be steep sometimes, but when you are passionated about something, that’s really not an issue! 😀