Unpopular opinion about computational physics and theoretical physics
Hey, 1st year phd physics here, working in pretty good university and institute, though institute is not directly for physics, but my department is supposed to be the one called 'theoretical', and people working in the department takes a lot of proud compared to other people or lets say sense of superiority over other departments, which are more on the experimental side.
I don't understand from where this coming from, because in our department most of the people who are working has least to do with the theoretical physics, as all we do is simulation and data analysis, integrating a lot of second order differential equations for classical particles with interactions, and then change the parameters and publish paper, and there you have it, groundbreaking research from the "theoretical physicists".
I do understand the importance of this kind of research, but in my opinion doing simulation and data analysis can not be equivalent to theoretical physics in any way, and then pretending to be theoretical physicists, because that's where all the charm is, calling it computational physics wouldn't be wrong, which has its own importance from research point of view, then why disguise it as theoretical physics.