Extras · 1 of 4

A typical day

If you are an experimentalist: mornings aligning or repairing equipment, afternoons running measurements or waiting on a machine, evenings analysing the data. If you are a theorist: a whiteboard, a notebook and a long simulation running somewhere. Both spend a surprising share of the week writing, because funding applications, papers and referee reports are how the field works. And a lot of coffee spent arguing about why a result cannot possibly be right.