Question: What's it like taking a PhD in physics? What sort of things do you do, and what's the work like?

Mike Lee answered on 11 Mar 2014:

Doing a PhD is good fun, but also a real challenge. It is different from studying a subject at school or university because everyone does a different PhD. One of the key outcomes of a PhD is that you must find out something new to science. This may sound difficult, or impossible, but you get excellent help from Professors, who’s job it is to guide you towards new and interesting work. For this reason, it’s very important to choose a good Professor!
There are three main areas to research in Physics: Theory, Experiments and Computational. With Theory, you use Mathematics to try and describe Experimental results, or predict results from experiments that have not yet been done. With Experiments, you are a bit like an engineer, building a piece of equipment capable of accessing the new physics you want to explore. Computational is a bit of both, you build an experiment on a computer and then run the computer code to get some results. This can be much faster, but is usually an approximation of reality.
I do experiments: I build microscopes and other optical systems and use them to explore small structures and processes. I need help from Theory experts from time to time in order to understand my results. Science is very much a team game!