In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.
You and amy1987 responding seem to think that math is the same thing as formulas. While there is a lot that can be done without formulas, physics is impossible without math. For instance, to understand spin one needs to understand representation theory. amy1987 mentioned QED. Well, QED certainly does have math. It presents complex numbers and path integrals and the stationary phase approximation. Math is just thinking that is absolutely and completely precise.
ADDED: I forgot to take the statements I reference in their context: responding to James_Miller. He clearly used 'math' to mean what appears in math textbooks. This makes my criticism invalid. I'm sorry.
From the context, I guess that was not what James_Miller meant.