• Question: how often do you find a hard, tricky problem?

    Asked by nezza to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 14 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by groomy99, jessicawoolley.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      All the time! That’s what science is about!

      Recently I had to check how accurately a motor was moving, as it would eventually go on our spacecraft and needed to be really accurate.

      You might think that this would be really easy, but we needed it to be accurate to about a thousandth of a millimetre.

      So to check I had to put it in a microscope and take pictures of it moving back and forth.

      But it turned out that the microscope was wobbling a tiny amount. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem as you don’t usually use a microscope for measuring things, but since we were trying to measure such a small movement, it turned out the wobble was bigger than this!

      It took me about a month to work through different solutions, in fact I wrote up the report and submitted it yesterday!

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      Every day – it keeps things interesting. I like to be challenged. One experiment I worked on had to be kept really really clean. This was hard because we have millions of bacteria on our hands. We had to work on the experiment in a special clean room, which is designed to have very low levels of contamination and we had to wear special suits that cover all of your body and head apart from your eyes. it’s really hot and uncomfortable but we managed to keep our experiment clean so it was worth it.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      All the time. As Adam said – scientific research is about finding the hard, tricky questions and working to figure them out.

      As my PhD advisor used to say when I hit problems – “If it was easy, someone would have done it already!”

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Science is full of hard problems. There’s this wonderful quote from US ex-president Kennedy when the USA were going to space:

      “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”

      I probably come across a really difficult thing about once every 6 months, and it can take me a couple of months to work it out. But the relief when you do work it out is amazing!

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