Question: tyhank you for the live chat! Why did you choose your area of science?

Kristian Harder answered on 13 Nov 2013:

You are very welcome! I’ve participated in four live chat sessions this week already, and this one was definitely the fastest one. You guys were very well prepared, and asking very interesting questions. Unfortunately I think I missed quite a few questions because I simply couldn’t keep up with everything happening at the same time.

My decision to go into particle physics was driven by being interested in getting down to the bottom of how things work. The most fundamental way of understanding the universe, figuring out where it all comes from, that’s what particle physics does. But at the same time I am a very hands-on person, and I think that’s why I ended up doing experimental work and not theory like Venus or Tim. Unfortunately (?) a side-effect of that is that I ended up spending most of time doing something that is more engineering than physics, and I have to think more about technical problems than about how the universe works, but that makes it even more enjoyable for me when I do get back to actually thinking about the physics that we are trying to figure out with our experiments.