• Question: hiya i have a question... What is the hardiest thing about science to you?

    Asked by 156utec37 to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 12 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 12 Jun 2015:

      That experiments don’t always work the way I thought they would. This can be very frustrating, but it is also by finding unexpected things that science moves forwards, so I guess I should be grateful for it!

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 12 Jun 2015:

      For me the hardest (though in some way coolest) thing about science is that you have to juggle a lot of really different tasks. For example, things like building electronics, giving talks, programming analyses and managing research money need really different mind sets but you may do them all in one day. So you have to get very flexible. And you have to be at least good enough at all of them to work in a group of people where everyone is brilliant at one or two things and ok-ish at the others.
      I’ve also seen people struggle with the fact that science is by definition uncertain. Most days something new will either not work or work differently from what you thought. You have to enjoy that process. For someone who most enjoys the moments when you have clear results, science can be frustrating. 🙂

    • Photo: Alison Whitaker

      Alison Whitaker answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      The hardest thing for me is keeping perspective of what science is and what science isn’t. This is known as ‘the nature of science’. There are lots of myths about what science is and I speak to many people who don’t really get that science doesn’t have all the answers. When you read something online or see something on the news about ‘cures’ or ‘proven’ theories, this is really just an expression of speech. Science can’t ‘prove’ anything, but it can (sometimes) say that things are very likely to happen because of something else. But there is lots of uncertainty in science, and that’s what makes it so interesting as we discover more and more about how the world works.

    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      I think the hardest thing about science is trying to not allow your current beliefs about something affect how you interpret the results of an experiment. For example, sometimes you already have an idea about how something may work, so you might do an experiment to prove it. When you get the results there might be 2 (or more) ways of interpreting the results but because you already believe in a particular explanation, you may end up prematurely discarding the other explanations. We call this bias. I think every scientist suffers from this type of bias and it’s really hard to get it out of your head.

    • Photo: Hannah Greenwood

      Hannah Greenwood answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      For me, it juggling all the different aspect of my job. The actual science (experiments, theories etc.) but also teaching students, training other scientists, preparing and giving presentations, the list quite often feels endless. The great thing about it thought is that two days are never the same and it’s always a challenge.

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