• Question: do you think science is boring

    Asked by jessicarosasmith to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 16 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by inesfontes, tarax, testtubelover, bethl, emilypalmer.
    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      Hi jessicarosasmith

      Thanks for the question, For me there is nothing more exciting than science. It can be a lot of hard work, but the rewards are always there when you finally understand something tricky, or even better discover something for the first time.

      So I’d say science might sometimes be frustrating, challenging, infuriating, but its never boring 🙂

    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      sometimes it can be boring, yes. when we started to commission our machine at daresbury, we need to condition our electron gun. this is a big piece of metal that needs to be kept at 500,000 volts. in order to get it to do that without sparking off and exploding you need to raise the voltage really slowly. so there i was, spending night after night sat on a stool in a hot room with lots of computers turning a knob a tiny bit to the right once every 15 minutes. that was pretty dull.
      but the same machine produces all our experimental results, getting them is the exciting bit.
      so yeah, you do have to go through bad times to get to the good times

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      I can identify with Peter’s experience too! We’d all have to sit shifts while the experiment was running (we would take data pretty much 24 hours a day continuously for weeks, so everyone had to muck in) and a lot of the time it was very quiet, especially if you were on the midnight to 8am shift. BUT you always knew the reason that you were doing it was so mega exciting that it outweighed all the hours spent trying to stay awake.

      I wouldn’t have dedicated nearly 8 years of my life to studying science if I thought it was boring! 😉
      I think it’s cool to be able to find out new stuff about the universe that no human has ever known before.

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      No, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t enjoy it – in fact the only reason I am a scientist in the first place is that I enjoy it. My job does not feel like a job, I am not saying I have bad days because everyone does, but generally I am so interested in my research that I want to do it. The more you learn about science the more interesting things become as you get to play with bigger toys and ask bigger and bigger questions.

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Not at all boring. Like most things, some of the training you have to do to get good at it is a bit boring (like practicing maths, and learning to do experiments – so many pendulums!). But once you get in to it it’s really the most interesting thing!

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