why you like to do experiments? – MRC Festival Zone 2018

Lauren Burns answered on 1 Jun 2018:

In Psychology, I found it fascinating to see how different people react to different situations, trying to understand why they behave, or think in a certain way is interesting. Seeing how easily group norms can change peoples’ opinions, or how fragile ‘memory’ is. I find these things important, but everyone is different, some people may look up in the sky and question how stars came to be, or look to the earth and wonder what are the differences between a millipede and a centipede. If there is a question you have that you are unable to answer (or people around you are unable to answer), then conducting an experiment gives you the ability to answer these questions yourself, and that is a great experience. Discovering something no-one else knows, then blow them away with your knowledge on the subject.

Joanne Sharpe answered on 1 Jun 2018:

If you have a question, and nobody in the world knows the answer, the only way to find the answer is to do an experiment. Designing and carrying out your experiments let you answer your own unique question, and that is why I love being a scientist.

Claire Donald answered on 1 Jun 2018:

Just like Joanne says, doing experiments is the most fun part about being a scientist! You will never learn the answer without doing an experiment to find out what it is. Sometimes you can do an experiment that teaches you something that no else knows- and you were the first person to know the answer because you did the experiment first. Also, many scientific discoveries were made by accident because someone just wondered what would happen. So if they hadn’t tried, we would never know!

Liza Selley answered on 1 Jun 2018:

Because every day is different and experiments let you be creative and inquisitive. I also love to do something practical rather than sitting in an office all day. The best thing about working with air pollution though is that the results can be used to change laws and to help improve the health of people worldwide.

Donna MacCallum answered on 1 Jun 2018:

You are able to find answers to your questions… find out new things that no one else has found before.

Claudia Bonfio answered on 1 Jun 2018:

I have always found a bit boring to study abstract concepts… Doing experiments is a good way to understand if you got the theory right, and also to apply what you’ve learnt… And it is so much funny! Of course, as a chemist, what I do is also very visual and colored (and sometimes a bit explosive), which is always funnier =)

Ashley Akbari answered on 1 Jun 2018:

Trying things that have not been done before and innovating! It can be frustrating at times but to use a famous quote by Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Damian Mole answered on 2 Jun 2018:

Finding out something that no-one has ever discovered before is the most tremendous buzz you can ever get!

Jason Chu answered on 2 Jun 2018:

With science and experiments I like to break it down to the three C’s.
Curious, creative and critical.
And you get to do all of it with experiments!
Let’s say I’m curious what this drug does to skin cells. I get to be creative and design an experiment to figure out what happens. Let’s put these skin cells in a plate, add the drug and see if they move quicker or slower?
I get the results and hey ho. My skin cells are moving faster with the drug. No-one else has found this before. That’s pretty cool. I then need to critically look at what I’ve done to improve my experiment or get curious about another question. Rinse and repeat.

Alex Haragan answered on 3 Jun 2018:

Experiments are the backbone of science!

You see something interesting – then what? Well you make a theory or hypothesis as to what it means or why it happened.

To see if you are right or not – you try to recreate the interesting event. You need to do it in a way that is controlled so that you can really test what you think. This is experimenting

Everyone knows the famous story of Isaac Newton and seeing the apple falling from the tree. He came up with the notion of gravity – but all these hundreds of years later we are still doing experiments to try and find out what gravity really means.

My experiments aren’t quite so grand – but I have a theory around lung cancer and why it can be different for different people. Without experiments I’ll never find the answer!

Hannah Farley answered on 3 Jun 2018:

I really like practical work, it’s way more fun than sitting at a desk all day. You get to find out new things which is kind of cool in a really nerdy way. Every day is different, and you can plan your work around coffee breaks and lunch. I particularly like making new plasmids, which are rings of DNA. You design them by copying and pasting bits of DNA in a computer programme, and its like a big puzzle making everything work with the DNA sequence and the enzymes (tools) you want to use to make it. So I think I like that you get to solve problems, you’re doing something practical, it’s unpredictable and you get to find out new things.

Joey Shepherd answered on 4 Jun 2018:

As the others said – it’s an essential part of science! It’s all about how you can test your ideas. It’s also fun and a creative process – you think of a question you want to answer, then you have to figure out HOW to answer your question, then you get to do the experiment. And when it all goes well, your experiment works as you planned and you find out something new, it makes you very happy 🙂

Laura Hemming answered on 4 Jun 2018:

As somebody who has experienced difficulties in the past with my mental health, I’m really keen to investigate why these things happen, and what we can do to try and help people recover from mental health difficulties. Therefore I love doing experiments which involve talking to people about their experiences of mental health, to try and get a better understanding of what sorts of things might lead to mental health difficulties. Hopefully, one day in the future, we can use these results to try and prevent people from developing problems with their mental health.

Question: why you like to do experiments?

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