• Question: Out of all the possible subject matter to study with the sciences, what made your choice for you?

    Asked by to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 12 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Matthew Malek

      Matthew Malek answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I wish I could give you some grand scheme that I had laid out from inspiration when I was a small child. That would make for a lovely story, wouldn’t it?

      The truth of the matter is that I ended up where I am largely by chance.

      When I went to uni, my intention was to study an interdisciplinary mix of philosophy and cognitive psychology. Physics wasn’t on my radar at all! In my second term, I took a quantum mechanics course. Just for fun. It was much more interesting than I had expected, explaining how you can use different combination of the same two quarks (called “up” and “down”) to build a proton or build a neutron. Or you can add other quarks to build strange and exotic new particles! By the end of the course, I knew that I wanted to be a physicist.

      I spent the rest of my undergraduate career focusing on physics, but as a postgraduate, I still didn’t know what specific part of physics I wanted to work on. I tried doing particle physics for awhile, as I had liked the particles I learned about as an undergrad (the quarks I mentioned above). It was fun, but I felt like I might be happier studying astronomy. So I joined an astro project for a few months. It was interesting, but I missed particle physics.

      Well, one fine day that Summer, the physics department had a bar-b-que. By chance, I ended up sitting next to a particular professor. As one of the younger students, he asked me a very natural question: “What have you decided to work on?” I answered honestly, saying I wasn’t sure and explaining that I liked both particles and astronomy.

      His reply? “I’m looking for a student to do particle astrophysics. Come talk to me on Monday.” The rest, as they say, is history…

      So, yes, for all our careful planning, chance can play an enormous role in our lives and careers. I sometimes wonder what route my career path would have taken if I had simply taken my burger and sat down at a different table that day.

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      What made me study nanoscience? There are lots of reasons.

      The main one is because I really love doing hands on, practical experiments. Theoretical physics involving spending all day working with equations or stuck behind a computer has never held any interest for me. Working in labs, actually physically controlling the atoms and molecules I’m studying is really cool. It makes what I’m doing seem more ‘real’.

      I studied a general physics degree, with a good mix of programming, theoretical stuff and experimental work. I always looked forward to the practicals, getting my hands on the apparatus and testing out what I’d learned in lectures.

      I wasn’t sure which area of experimental physics I wanted to go into, until I had a practical class on using a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM). STMs work by exploiting a quantum effect known as ‘tunnelling’ whereby a charge can seemingly ‘jump’ across a gap and be detected. By passing a very fine metal tip across a material, we can collect the charge and map the atomic arrangement of the surface atoms.

      The STM was a tiny tabletop model, no bigger than my hand, but with it I managed to image a gold surface – it allowed me to actually *see* gold atoms. Wow! It totally blew me away. Until then, atoms had just been circular diagrams on blackboards or in textbooks.

      From then, I knew I wanted to study nanomaterials, to learn about the structure and atomic properties of the world around us and why things behaved so strangely at small scales. That lecturer who let me use the STM in the undergraduate lab ended up being my PhD supervisor thus beginning my research into quantum dots, nanocrystals, nanotubes and a whole host of novel materials.

    • Photo: Mike Lee

      Mike Lee answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I like optics because it is a hands on subject, where you get to build your own experiments, working creatively with hands and brain.

      I’m not sure exactly how I ended up here, there are plenty of routes to take. I think sometimes it’s more important to pick one and go for it, rather than spending too much time deciding which option is best.

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 16 Mar 2014:

      Some basic ideas of why I got into physics are at http://goo.gl/yWwTsY and http://goo.gl/VS9mCo. But why I chose my specific topic? Each major topic I have been involved with was a complete accident.

      I didn’t have any idea about different topics in physics until the end of undergraduate studies. My advisor suggested I move to NYC to study with an old friend of his named Brian Greene. I had never heard of him but he seemed like a good guy to work for. He suggested I start learning about superstring cosmology, and specifically the Brandenberger-Vafa mechanism of why we observe only three large spatial dimensions. I ended up writing my thesis on this topic. Towards the end of my Ph.D. I happened to share an office with a student working on cosmic superstrings, and he would talk to me about issues in his research; after I while I ended up just collaborating with him, which formed the focus of the next several years of my research. Then my boss wanted to organize a conference on the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background and asked whether I could help with the organization. I found the topic so interesting that I spent the next several years doing that.

      So you see that just random chance plays a large part of what topics scientists choose to research. Looking back we can always see which were more promising than others, but at the time it’s not clear which paths will lead to a payoff. As the old saying goes, “If I knew what I was doing it wouldn’t be called research!”

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