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Asked by anon-205639 to Russell, Kathryn, Gabriel on 4 Mar 2019.
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Russell Arnott answered on 4 Mar 2019:
i have to:
answer emails
write up my experiments so other scientists can learn from them
teach students and mark work
process data and make graphs
write applications to get money to do more research
arrange travel to go to meetings / do research at different places around the world
go to my lab and run experiments
talk to other scientists about their work so i can learn from them
talk to the public and students so they understand why my research is important
answer questions from school children in a chatroom 😉
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Gabriel Gallardo answered on 5 Mar 2019: last edited 5 Mar 2019 2:59 am
Russell has pretty much covered the everyday work of a scientist. But what makes a scientist a scientist? How is it different from other jobs?
As scientists we practice the _scientific method_. This means when we see something interesting, we try to come up a theory that explains what we see. We then design an experiment to see if our theory was wrong. If our experiment says our theory was wrong, then we try to come up with a different theory that explains both the interesting thing we saw the first time and the result of our experiment. Then we do another experiment to test that new theory, and so on and so on.
Notice I didn’t say, “we try to see if our theory is correct”. This is because we can never be 100% sure that we are correct. For example, Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, from 1687, seems to be “correct” most of the time. You can design lots of experiments (like, say, tossing an apple into the air at a certain speed, and checking how much time it takes for it to fall to the ground) that don’t dis-prove gravity. But you can also come up with experiments that do disprove gravity. Newton’s theory doesn’t work for things that go really really fast (as in, close to the speed of light), and so we need a new theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity from 1916, for the times when Newton’s theory doesn’t work. Even Einstein’s theory doesn’t work all of the time, like in black holes, or at the very beginning of the universe – we’re still looking for a new theory that might explain all that.
As a scientist, you accept that you are probably wrong most of the time, and you try to find ways to be less wrong. 😛
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Kathryn Boast answered on 5 Mar 2019:
You end up doing quite a lot of *thinking* – about what the question you want to answer is, about how you can answer it, about what experiments might tell you the answer, about how best to do the experiment, about what the experiment told you, about how to tell other people what the experiment told you and so on.
Then there’s also the *doing* – actually building and running the experiment, and going through the data, making tables and graphs and doing the maths needed.
Then there’s also the *sharing* – writing up your results in a paper, going to conferences and giving talks or showing posters about your results, maybe doing some extra sharing with people outside your field at a science festival or in a blog post or news article.
Some of this you do on your own, but a lot of it will be working with other scientists. Actually you could probably share pretty much every step of this in some way. Science often works best when teams of people tackle problems together.
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