David J. C. MacKay continued his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences (Experimental and theoretical physics) in 1988. He went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a Fulbright Scholar, where his supervisor was John Hopfield. He was awarded a PhD in 1992. In January 1992 MacKay was appointed the Royal Society Smithson Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, continuing his cross-disciplinary research in the Cavendish Laboratory, the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory. He was promoted in 1999 to
Experimental physics experiments. Experimental physics Experimental physics is the category of disciplines and sub-disciplines in the field of physics that are concerned with the observation of physical phenomena and experiments. Methods vary from discipline to discipline, from simple experiments and observations, such as the Cavendish experiment, to more complicated ones, such as the Large Hadron Collider. Experimental physics regroups all the disciplines of physics that are concerned with data acquisition, data–acquisition methods, and the detailed conceptualization (beyond simple thought experiments) and realization of laboratory experiments. It is often put in contrast with theoretical physics, which is more concerned with predicting and explaining