Quote:
Originally Posted by julianh72
My sister has a PhD in Chemical Physics; she gets HIGHLY offended when someone "accuses" her of being a Physical Chemist!  (Although I still have trouble working out where the boundaries are - and I can't even understand the half-page abstract from her PhD Thesis.) |
There are no boundaries or if there are they are very blurry. If your sister gets offended, she needs to lighten up. It's a blessing that she can pass for both because it means she will be accepted by and have the confidence of scientists from both major disciplines.
But basically if you did your PhD in the university's chemistry department with a chemist as your main supervisor then you are a chemist who specialised in theoretical/physical chemistry. If you did it in the physics department with a physicist supervisor then you're a physicist, who specialises in applications to chemistry (most typically theoretical and computational quantum physics of atoms and molecules).
Physicist is the most malleable profession in the sciences. Many of the best chemists, biologists and biochemists started life as physicists. That includes many Nobel prize winners as well as inventors of breakthrough lifesaving drugs and vaccines. Goes back at least as far as the outstanding physicist Earnest Rutherford, who was said to have looked down on chemists and chemistry --- quote: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" --- but the poor sod ended up receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
