• Question: What made you so interested in your field of work?

    Asked by hollyb14 to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 7 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Matthew Malek

      Matthew Malek answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Good question! (And really tough to answer, too!)

      My work is not so much a job, or even a career, as it is a calling or a vocation. I study the universe at the largest and smallest scales — is it any wonder I find it fascinating? I can’t really say that I know why I find it interesting… but I can tell you that I didn’t plan on being a physicist at all when I got to uni. It was a professor who explained a little particle physics that got me to change fields. So I guess I’ve always found this sort of thing inherently exciting — even if I didn’t know it yet!

    • Photo: Sabina Hatch

      Sabina Hatch answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      This was a difficult one to answer…I am interested in a lot of different science fields, particle physics and astrophysics especially! But I chose this field to work in because I felt I could make a difference to peoples everyday life. Whether something I have made can be used to provide power to a house, or used as LEDs in your TVs, or a photodetector that can detect UV light in outer space. Knowing that I can have an impact on what we use everyday is what interests me about this field.

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Each time you have a question in science you find yourself questioning the underlying assumptions. Richard Feynman once said it was like peeling away layers of an onion, though he was not sure whether it eventually stopped or “was onion all the way down.” There is a joke that psychology is just applied biology, biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry is just applied physics, physics is just applied mathematics. Since I am willing to just accept mathematics as it is, the next most basic question is “Why is the Universe here in the first place?”

      The amazing thing is, until just a few years ago we knew almost nothing about the answer. Only in 1929 did Hubble discover the Universe was expanding. Only in 1964 was the echo of the Big Bang, the earliest light in the Universe known as the Cosmic Microwave Background – discovered. Only in 1981 was the inflationary theory proposed, forming the modern understanding of the early Universe. And only last year were we able to take such precise a picture of the CMB allowing us to make detailed statements about the quantum interactions taking place. We now know to within a fraction of a percent the age of the Universe and its composition of normal matter, radiation, dark matter, and dark energy.

      Being able to understand why the Universe is here would give a new perspective of why the other areas of physics are important, and even our place in it all. So for me it’s hard to imagine someone NOT wanting to understand such an important question which is making so much progress.

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      The thing that I like most about my field is that I can be really creative. And there are so many research opportunities in materials science than ever before.

      In the lab I’m doing something that’s never been done by anybody at any time, ever. The freedom to able to ask “I wonder how this works.” and then trying it out is pretty cool.

      One other thing I enjoy about my field is communicating the research and having interactions with people who can develop my research so it has beneficial uses. It’s thrilling to see other people are using my research and applying them to solving problems.

Comments

  • Photo: Mark

    Mark commented on :

    If you start with an science and keep asking ‘Why?’ you are led to theoretical physics. From there you can pick your favorite topic. I started out in superstring theory, because that seemed like the most promising theory to explain all of physics. But it’s frustrating that so much of the work is nowhere near being able to experimentally confirm it. I then settled into “cosmology with a stringy flavor,” since there were a lot of exciting developments in cosmology and some of these could be explained by superstring theory. For a more detailed description of why I chose specific research topics see http://goo.gl/pqaiB5.