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Although I am something between a physicist and a mathematician, science of all kinds become part of your everyday life. You simply cannot help it. It is not like counting the minutes to get away from a boring office and do something else, although we like and do many other things. There is always something around you that makes you think; when you wake up, when you take a shower, when you walk around, when you are actually doing work. It becomes simply the way you understand the world…and that is what we do everyday: trying our best to understand the world…although many times we may get it completely wrong. Being wrong is an essential part of being a scientist. But you have to be clever to realise that you missed it in the first place.

 

A lot of the work of a theoretical physicist (a person who likes to think about experiments but when is actually in a lab those never seem to work) is simply to think about stuff but in a slightly different way. When we look at something and try to understand how does it work, or why does it happen, we may think of many things. When we believe we have an answer, before telling it to someone else, we usually try to convince ourselves that it is true. That is actually the hard bit. There are many ways to fool ourselves so we must be very concious that we are not cheating. There won’t be anyone there to tell us right away that we got it wrong. A very useful way to try our ideas was most remarkably used by Einstein himself. It is simply thinking about an experiment (even if it is very difficult to actually make it) to test the wildest consequences of our ideas. If they do not contradict something we already knew, then we might be in the right track. 
So, my typical day consists of trying to understand that the idea that just flew into my mind is true, or at least find out how far can I go with it before getting it completely wrong.  No timetables at all.