Edit: to actually answer tng's question:

Like a lot of physicists (I'm just a padawan), I get the most excited about reconciling general relativity and quantum theory - a grand unification theory. The problem is that for the time being, wedding these two ideas together is limited to theory. And many different theories have arisen... various flavors of string theory, loop quantum gravity, etc., but we're unable to eliminate most of them. Why? Because of our lack of experimental technology.

Some brands of supersymmetry were actually disproven by data from the LHC (can you imagine your life's work invalidated?). Soon, the thing will soon be smashing atoms at 14 TeV, but even after three years of data collection, then decades of analysis and discussion, we probably still won't see experimentalism driving theoretical direction. It will be a game of catch-up to figure out how to smash things together faster, or design an ultra-sensitive orbiting cosmic ray observatory, something absolutely nuts. I truly believe that if we can analyze enough decay events of ever-increasing collision energies, we'll eventually see something we can't explain. This could spur a series of experiments that leads us towards a grand unification theory.

The work that Hawking is doing with quantum information theory at the event horizons of black holes is excellent. This boundary, the event horizon, is an excellent playground for theoretical musings, and even a testing ground for a theory's mathematical integrity. It could lead to discovery or aid in the confirmation of a grand unifying theory framework.

About the Higgs: The Higgs was predicted to exist 50 years ago to "explain" mass. It's complicated, but what I'd really like to point out is that it took nearly 50 years to develop the technology that was required to confirm this theoretical idea. Yes, this was the LHC, again. The Higgs was kind of a crowning achievement of what I hastily called "quantum theory" earlier; The Standard Model.

I don't want to work on grand unification theory, but I think it's one of the purest pursuits of mankind. The field is unfortunately saturated as a result, and because there is no demonstrable application towards any kind of product or profit, completely over-saturated. Hah, papers coming out of the LHC have more pages dedicated to the co-authors than the actual content of the published content. To be fair, the thing is one of our greatest technical achievements to date, and is necessarily complex.

There's also the possibility that the next Einstein is out there, bending spoons for Neo or whatever, and he'll just show up to Oxford some day with 5 pages of simple axioms from which every branch of any theory ever precipitates out with relatively simple math.

I have been having some fun lately though... currently working with Rosetta data, scripting in IDL and using some terminal commands to make .gif files of data. I'm closing in on automating this process completely.

Also doing a field of view analysis for one of the instrument suites that will be flying on Solar Probe Plus.

Getting ready for MMS launch on March 12th... As if I need an excuse to roadtrip to Florida for Spring Break? Then commissioning activities for a few months before science operations really get going.

As you can imagine, it's hard to walk away from this job, but I'll eventually hit a glass ceiling if I don't go to graduate school.

Haven't been vocal on Hubski enough lately for the above reasons, but I'm still lurkin'! :)