• Question: What do you like experimenting the most?

    Asked by anon-205641 to Kathryn, Gabriel, Jose Angel, Russell on 5 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-205871.
    • Photo: Kathryn Boast

      Kathryn Boast answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I really like building new little demonstrations of interesting bits of science. I’ll take an idea or a concept and try to find a way to show off exactly how it works. I usually end up sitting on my office floor surrounded by bits of kit, just trying stuff out! It’s such a good feeling when it finally works.

    • Photo: Russell Arnott

      Russell Arnott answered on 14 Mar 2019:

      As an oceanographer, I tend not to do experiments but rather try to measure the ocean and the organisms in it accurately to try and explain patterns.
      Saying that, I do sometimes conduct experiments with big tanks of water where I try to recreate the natural conditions and tweak them to see the responses of the organisms.
      But I used to be Physics Teacher and I loved doing A-level experiments where you didn’t really know what was going to happen and you had to figure it out yourself. In Physics, it’s about the subtle experiments – for example we once used a tin can, some water, a thermometer, an umbrella and basic GCSE maths to work out the power output of the Sun. That was pretty awesome.

    • Photo: Gabriel Gallardo

      Gabriel Gallardo answered on 15 Mar 2019:

      I’m on the ATLAS experiment right now, where we try to break protons apart to see what the universe is made of – that’s pretty cool!
      In my off time I’m learning to cook, so that’s also a pretty interesting series of chemistry experiments!

    • Photo: Jose Angel Martinez-Gonzalez

      Jose Angel Martinez-Gonzalez answered on 15 Mar 2019:

      It would be difficult to say. I have done so many experiments (both virtual / theoretical, and real in a laboratory) that I do not know which to stay with. Maybe one of the ones I liked the most was one of the ones I did in my time in Dublin, where we made a bluetack ring that we placed on a plastic surface and placed water from the ring.

      After this we mediated with a spectrophotometer the vibrational spectrum of water, which tells us how this water is moving in that very small space. We also checked how there were subtle changes in this spectrum.

      This experiment is the origin for what I call the water dance …

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