• Question: Do you think your work could change history forever and do you think you have the best job in the world

    Asked by howmayer1 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      My work forms a very small part of a much larger programme. Most science works this way. The things that change the world are very often the product of lots of different people’s work.

      It would be the best job in the world if I got paid more, I think!

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I am trying to work out our evolutionary history, so in a way, I am writing the history books, not changing them!

      We don’t know exactly happened from the time life started on earth to when animals appeared, and that is about 4 billion years of evolution we know nothing about. It won’t change anyone’s lives to know, but it will help us understand how we got here, and how other life on other planets might be evolving. Maybe it will help us find and communicate with aliens, which would be pretty life changing!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I like to think I’m making a contribution. Almost 1000 people have read (or at least claim to have read) the papers I’ve contributed to. So that feels nice. And I think being involved in Galaxy Zoo I have contributed to changing the way people think about interacting with citizen scientists.

      The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Astronomers who demonstrated through their observations that the expansion of the universe seemed to be speeding up. We call this mysterious effect “dark energy” and their work definitely changed a part of our history. So I suppose anything is possible. Who knows what’s hiding round the next corner of my research.

      I do think I have the best job in the world for me at the moment. I’m having great fun with it right now 0 I just wish I could be sure I could keep doing it and not get pushed out due to lack of funding for science. There are quite a lot of structural problems with the scientific career in my opinion. By that I mean the fact that you have to do a lot of short term contracts and move around a lot. That makes it tricky for a lot of people which I think is a pity and quite wasteful of all the training they’ve done.

      I think there are probably a lot of jobs out their that are better for humanity than mine – like trying to cure cancer, or finding a solution to poverty. But I think that doing astronomy and other science is very important for us as a civilization – to understand our place in the universe.

      And everyone should do what suits them best. And ideal world could be one in which everyone is able to work on something that interests them or that they are good at doing, and is paid fairly so that no-one goes hungry.

      As Douglas Adams points out in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – we even need the telephone sanitizers of the world! 😉 I think maybe we could live with less celebrities though – and we could certainly pay them (and footballers) a bit less! 😉

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