• Question: What is your favourite thing about science and why?

    Asked by joeyboii to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 18 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by lollyockham01, bullowayo10, 13ymag.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 18 Nov 2013:

      I’ll answer this question in two ways – generally about all of science and about my own personal science work.

      Science is everything we know about the world around us and is the way that we carry on learning new things about the world. Because of this my favourite thing about all of science is that it allows us to advance in technology and discover new things – this includes the technology behind a cool new film and smart phone as well as advances in medicine that can provide new treatments for diseases to improve our lives.

      For the science that I do every day in the lab, my favourite thing is the feeling that I get when an experiment has worked well and I get some interesting and good results. When things are going well, it can be exciting to be discovering new things and getting answers to your questions. Then you show someone else the work you’ve done and they’re impressed, which is also a great feeling. After putting in many hours of work, those moments of joy and relief that your experiments have worked are fantastic. Those moments are the thing that drive me to carry on doing the work even when sometimes things aren’t working as I want them to and it can all be a bit stressful.

      I hope this answers your question joeyboii!

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      For me it’s simply that I like being able to be the first person in the world to see something. We make new discoveries in science all the time and it is a nice feeling to know that you’re the first person to have seen your discovery. These discoveries then go on to further our understanding of the world around us.

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