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.
Yes I am not a physicist, I will at best be a first year CS bachelor student in a little over a year from time of posting. I am, however, really good at mathematics. Good enough in fact to be able to solve partial differential equations in complex scalar fields, and simulate them accordingly with custom written C programs as a hobby.
I might not know the first equation of QTF, but I can write a Schroedinger-wave-packet equation, derive the time dependent differentialtion, discretize it and simulate it in a two dimensional discrete hilbert space with dependent potential wells and set the initial state to high independence.
I don't know, but apparently not enough. I seem to misremember having heard a figure of more than half.
Transitional Wave and Bhomian Mechanics, or however they are spelt. The former is something tricky to do with time-reversed wave-packets, the latter postulates point-shaped particles in addition to the wave packets and was disproven early on.
Yes it is, I am sorry, it was a rethorical slip up.