Ask an (drunk) experimental physicist anything

Have you ever fucked up and come close to anything Really Really Dangerous in an experiment?

you forgot Lenz

I didn't fuck up, but I came close to getting a nice dose of mustard gas to the face because our ventilation system wasn't great and some Teflon tape near a gasket came loose since another guy in the lab wrapped it the wrong way around a bolt.

Lenz's law is just Faraday's law with a negative sign

so it really is just Faraday then

For that one case in particular sure, but you can't derive Gauss' law from Farady.

Gauss was a jerk

Sure, but so was Feynmann, Einstein, and Gell-mann. They're good at what they do

Hope u still here, I've talked to a lot of theoretical physicists and they all say experimental physiscsts are just at the right place at the right time. Can you confirm people having a "bad" opinion about you?

The banter goes both ways. There is a lot of experimental physics that does involve just stumbling into something big, but most of us chip away at bigger pictures and don't get so lucky. A lot of experimentlists just say that the theory guys are doing the best they can to make our lives difficult, by saying that new physics is always juuuuuuuuust around the corner and we have to build bigger and more complex systems to find it. That's been the joke with super symmetry for a long time. the theory guys always manage to push the mass of super symmetric particles right outside of our reach every time we get a better accelerator.