What are the best London universities for Theoretical Physics?

My 4 out of 5 choices are Imperial, UCL, QMUL (I know they don't do Theoretical Physics) & KCL, but I'm not sure what uni I should choose for my 5th option

Reply 1

CheeseIsVeg

Original post by Shinei17

My 4 out of 5 choices are Imperial, UCL, QMUL (I know they don't do Theoretical Physics) & KCL, but I'm not sure what uni I should choose for my 5th option

A good university is the one best suited to you. A little bit of time spent researching the course (which is the important bit) and the university will pay off. The open days / chatting to past students and asking academics questions will definitely help. If you have more specific questions I am happy to help.

Reply 2

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

Theoretical physics isn't something you "do" until graduate level and you still need to cover all the same core physics content. If you look at undergrauate courses in "theoretical" physics, you'll see they're essentially identical to the regular physics course except have certain optional modules preselected and sometimes you don't have to do some of the labwork (which is probably a negative really because even theoretical physicists need to understand the experimental principles so the theories they are building are actually testable).

So you should really just be looking at which offer a good physics course with optional modules of interest. QMUL is ironically probably better placed for this as I believe they have more academics working in theoretical physics areas and have more optional modules in those areas than KCL and UCL.

If you're limiting yourself to London then I think the only other option at all is RHUL off the top of my head. I'm not even sure there are other unis in London offering physics? Note that for QMUL/RHUL/UCL/KCL you can take optional modules at the other unis through the intercollegiate optional module scheme I believe. So the differences between those are much reduced in terms of the course itself as you'll do the same core physics topics every physics degree will cover, and you can pretty much pick and choose optional modules from whichever as desired.