• Question: What is your favourite thing to do/study in science

    Asked by anon-187208 to David, Stewart on 12 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-187692.
    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      My favourite branch of science has to be physics — that’s why I’m doing it as a PhD! I really enjoy the process of taking a physical system and working out how it all comes from a few simple rules; to me that makes me appreciate the beauty of things even more! I also love how looking closer at things reveals hidden connections — it turns out the same equations can describe very different situations. For example, the conduction of heat through a metal bar follows almost exactly the same equation as the evolution of a quantum particle!

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Favourite thing to do is to start not knowing the answer to something, then figure it out.

      Often for me that means writing a program to calculate some numbers, but it’s not always clear how to get started. But there is a sense of achievement once you’ve actually written it and seen it working. Nowadays a lot of code I wrote runs on computers all over the world, and particularly a large set of computers at CERN, where it’s used to filter out data we know isn’t likely to be interesting.

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