• Question: What made you want to go into a career in science? and what do you love best about your job and research you do?

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

      Matthew Malek answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      I didn’t go to uni to do science… or at least not the sort of science that I do now. I wanted to make a career doing some sort of interdisciplinary work between philosophy and psychology. (Maybe cognitive psychology?)

      Anyway, I took a quantum mechanics course for fun during my first year. It was REALLY interesting! I already knew about protons, neutrons, and electrons as the building blocks of atoms, of course. This class started to teach me about quarks, though, and how you could use different combinations of the same two quarks (called “up” and “down”) to make a proton or a neutron. Or how you could use other quarks (like “strange”) in combination with those two to make exotic new particles that I had never heard of!

      Well, by the end of the course, I was hooked. I knew that I wanted to be a particle physicist… and, years later, that’s exactly what I am!

      You also asked what I love best about my job, doing experimental particle and astroparticle physics. It’s hard to choose, because there are so many awesome parts to what I do! I’ll pick the top two:

      1) Being on the cutting edge of research about the most fundamental nature of the universe, and

      2) Getting to travel to distant corners of the globe, where I work with world-class technology. I love to travel, so I usually make time for sightseeing after the work is done! In this way, I’ve gotten to see Taiwan, Argentina, Korea, Italy, Japan, France, and more!

    • Photo: Sabina Hatch

      Sabina Hatch answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Well I enjoyed physics at school, and after A-levels I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I decided to go for Physics at university. After university I was so sick of exams and my brain felt like it had been fried, so I took some time off. Still no idea what I wanted as my career so I decided to take the opportunity and travel around the world for a while. On my return I did various jobs that were not science related, but they didn’t challenge me mentally and I grew bored. I then remembered that I actually really enjoyed my Masters project working on nanowires, so I decided that would would try and do a PhD. I also wanted to make a difference in the world and I was keen to work on renewable energies.

      What I love best about my job is that I learn new and interesting things all the time. The best part of my research is knowing that I could make a real difference to the world and help with the energy crisis that is becoming more critical every day.

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 9 Mar 2014:

      Newton once said, “If I have seen further than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” This is often quoted as an example of how modest he was, but actually it was the opposite: Newton was making fun of his hunchback rival Robert Hooke. Yes, even brilliant scientists can be jerks sometimes.

      But the spirit of the quote is true. Each generation learns the knowledge available at the time, then questions it, teases it, pulls it, pushes it, squishes it until cracks form. We are then required to produce an answer capable of explaining everything known before, but withstanding the problems. What seems obvious to us now was once a revolutionary insight by a single person, and what seems impossible to us now will one day be laughed at.

      I love that science gives us this connection with previous generations, and something to pass on to future generations.
      It’s like one of those “Generation Quilts” in which each thread is a little bit of knowledge. And if you’re lucky enough to add a few threads of your own, they will be there for all time.

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      When I was in school, I had really great science teachers. They did all kinds of hands-on experiments in the classroom. In one particular experiment, they used an electroscope to demonstrate the photoelectric effect:

      http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/elibrary/resource/4103/photoelectric-effect

      this simple demonstration with a piece of gold leaf showed me all those equations I’d been copying from the blackboard were real probably more than any other experiment. From then on I knew I wanted to be part of this and pursue a career in science.

      The best thing about my job is at Cambridge I get to work alongside world -leading researchers in the UK’s best materials science department (2nd best in the world!) and get to travel the world using massive, cutting-edge facilities. It can be quite competitive, but that helps drive up the quality of the research we do, and who knows, maybe the materials I’m working on will end up on our roofs harnessing the sun’s power and help save the world from global warming.

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