• Question: whats the most interesting part about your work?

    Asked by anon-217578 to Harrison, Savannah, Joanna, Philippe on 10 Jun 2019. This question was also asked by anon-217325, anon-217052.
    • Photo: Harrison Prosper

      Harrison Prosper answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Solving puzzles. There is something marvelous about struggling with a problem for days, or even weeks on end, and then suddenly, out of the blue, hitting on the way to solve it. Science is about solving lots of little problems day by day until one day you realize that you’ve actually made some progress. Sometimes the progress is very modest; but now and again it is significant.

    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 11 Jun 2019:

      The most interesting part of my work is getting to see physics theories come to life in front of my eyes. It is sometimes difficult to appreciate theories when they seem so abstract and the maths is really really complicated! But a good theory always makes predictions that we can test experimentally – that’s where I come in. I look at real data and see if it agrees with the theories that lots of clever people have come up with. The theory that we test the most in particle physics is called the “Standard Model”. So far, it has passed every test we have thrown at it – but we physicists are stubborn people and keep trying to find new ways to test it every day. Hopefully one day we will be able to break it because that will lead to exciting and brand new physics!

    • Photo: Philippe Gambron

      Philippe Gambron answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      What I like is that we build something with our minds and, then, discovers that it describes well what we observe.

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