• Question: What is the ultimate aim for you in your career? Is there something you really want discover, or something you want the opportunity to do, or an achievement you'd like to recieve?

    Asked by lumiereclair to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 7 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Sabina Hatch

      Sabina Hatch answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Ultimate aim….I guess that would be a Nobel Prize. That would signify a ground-breaking discovery in my field. Something that has changed the world! It will also mean that from that point on I would have no problems funding my research- ever!

      But a more realistic aim would be to develop the next generation solar cell, something that is both very efficient and yet quite cheap to make. If I manage to do this then I would feel I have done my part to make the world a better place.

    • Photo: Matthew Malek

      Matthew Malek answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Oooh, good question! I don’t know about “ultimate” aims, because every question or discovery leads to more questions. But I can say what my Big Two aims are right now:

      1) Understand why there is matter in the universe. If matter and anti-matter are symmetric, the Big Bang should have produced an equal amount of each… which would probably have collided and annihilated almost immediately afterward, leaving only energy (radiation) behind.

      Even if the annihilation were prevented, we should be in a universe with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter… yet this is not the case. Virtually no primordial anti-matter remains. Why??

      We know that matter and anti-matter are not perfectly symmetric. This was discovered in by Jim Cronin and his colleagues decades ago. The difference is called “CP violation”. However, the measured CP violation is really really small — far too small to explain why there is matter (and only matter) in the universe. I’m hoping that my work with neutrinos will hope to shed some light on this puzzle.

      2) Detect dark matter: We know that about 85% of the mass in the universe is some new particle, or class of particles. We don’t know what it is, though. The puzzle has persisted since the 1930s, when Fritz Zwicky accidentally discovered dark matter by observing the motions of galaxies in the Coma cluster. Eighty years later, we have loads more evidence that it exists… but still no clue what it is! I think we’re closing in, though, and hope that the next decade or so will finally see this mystery solved. I’ve worked on dark matter detection beter, and hope to go back to it soon…

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 8 Mar 2014:

      You have probably heard the expression, “Give a man a fish, he can eat for a day; teach a man to fish, he can eat for a lifetime.” The physics equivalent of this is that I don’t want to just discover something, I want to understand something so well that I develop tools enabling other people can solve problems they couldn’t before.

      I’ll give an example using light. Have you noticed that light bends when it travels from air to water? Did you wonder why it bends, and why it makes the angle it does? We know the light begins somewhere in the air, and must end somewhere in the water. Fix those points. Imagine all the possible paths the light could take between those points – and don’t just include boring paths with a single bend, include ALL THE CRAZY PATHS YOU WANT TO, like the light beam moving in circles, flying out the window, getting a hamburger, going to the moon, and then coming back to finish in in the final spot. Now figure out which path took the LEAST AMOUNT OF TIME. This immediately rules out all the crazy paths – the light must make a single bend, but other than that any curving is a waste of time. The trouble is, how much time does it spend in the air, and how much in the water?

      I’ll give you a hint: light travels slower in water than in air. So it will spend more time in the air than in the water, but eventually it must jump into the water and get to the finish point. If you now carefully calculate how much time each path (corresponding to a different bending angle) takes, the path it takes is the one which minimizes the time it takes! But wait, it gets even better.

      The truly amazing thing is: this isn’t just the explanation for how light bends. IT’S ALSO THE EXPLANATION FOR HOW ALL OF PHYSICS WORKS! Instead of the path of least time for light there is a slightly more general concept called “least action,” but the basic idea is identical. A system could take literally any path, but will choose the one with the least action. It’s like physics wants to be as lazy as it can. This was discovered hundreds of years ago but still gives me the shivers. I’d like to discover a really fundamental principle like this.

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      One ultimate aim is to be the head of my own research group doing interesting and novel research. I don’t seek glory or prizes as others might do, I like the thrill of scientific investigation – discovering something new.

      As soon as one question is answered, another pops up – curiosity is what drives science! 🙂

      For something I’d like to discover, there are lots of unanswered questions out there. In the short/medium term, I’d like to think that the research I’m doing now may possibly help people in developing countries get access to cheaper energy in the future. Sunlight has by far the highest theoretical potential of the earth’s renewable energy sources and by investigating ways to bring the material and processing costs down, I hope to make a positive impact on these peoples’ lives.

    • Photo: Mike Lee

      Mike Lee answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Ultimately, my goal is to become a principle investigator, with my own laboratory and equipment.

Comments