• Question: What do you mean by a video of a day in the life of an experiment?

    Asked by jpo768 to Jony, Ben, Katharine on 15 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by randomguy.
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      Particle physics experiments are very complicated things to build and keep running – it takes a team of people working day and night to take the precious data that we analyse. So if I were to take a video in the day of the life of an experiment it would focus not only on the technology but also the important people whose job it is to keep the complex machines running.

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      One of my ideas is to make a video (or a few videos) of a day in the life of a scientist, so you’d see their full day, leaving for work, their journey, their day at work, down the pub or the gym or whatever afterwards (sped up a lot of course) – so not just the stuff they were doing in the lab. The I’d have a short interview with them afterwards. (I would obvously switch the camera off for *certain* things!).

      I think one of the great things about IAS is that you get to find out about scientists as people. Science is developing and moving forward all the time, which is not just about technology, accelerators and computers but also about people and, importantly, people working together. So I’d like to try and give a more rounded picture of what it’s like to be a scientist.

Comments