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Asked by ameera0786 to Alexander, Josh, Serena, Simone, Stuart on 18 Jun 2013.
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Josh Makepeace answered on 18 Jun 2013:
Hi ameera0786! I’ve been quite lucky with travel. Just to be able to come to the UK to study has been an amazing opportunity for me. Since I’ve been studying here, I’ve been to the US and France to do experiments, and to Italy and Japan for conferences. My housemates are very jealous, so science can involve lots of travel. It’s lots of fun going to see new places and meet scientists in other countries.
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Simone Sturniolo answered on 19 Jun 2013:
I have worked in Italy, my home country, and the UK, plus I have spent a three months period in Germany to work with another group of researchers and learn from them :). Besides that, for conferences or courses, I’ve been to Ireland, Netherlands, and will go to Spain this summer. A researcher’s life often involves a lot of travel: consider that at any given time there are not many universities or laboratories studying a certain subject in the world, so when you look for a new job you may have to move to a different country only to find someone that specializes in what you are interested in! Also, sometimes you do so because you want a chance to work with someone who’s very good at what you want to learn and who can teach you well, and there are preciously few of those :).
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Serena Corr answered on 19 Jun 2013:
Hi ameera0786!
I am originally from Ireland – that is where my parents and brothers still live. So I started work there. Then I started traveling to conferences around the world – Germany, UK, France, USA – and when I was at a meeting in Japan, I met a professor there who was doing really interesting work on materials that change their electronic behavior. So, I decided to move to the US to work there for two years on these materials. That was a lot of fun! I worked in a lab, right next to the ocean, in Santa Barbara in California. I used to eat my lunch with my friends next to the beach, where we often saw dolphins and seals! Then I moved to the UK, where I had a job in Canterbury. I live in Scotland now, which I really love. I still travel to lots of scientific meetings around the world – to New Zealand, India, Mexico – to speak to other scientists about our latest discoveries. I am very lucky to have a job which takes me to great places to meet with such interesting people!
Comments
07stoombs commented on :
If you discover something that changes everything we have ever known about science, how do you show people, I mean, what makes it official? And do different countries have different opinions about science, for example the elementary charge is 6.63 x 10^-19, but does the whole world accept this? How do you get the whole world to agree on something?
Simone commented on :
The official way is to publish papers on scientific journals. There are a certain number of journals that are acknowledged as being famous and trusted in the world. They all write in English, so they can be read everywhere. When you write a paper documenting your discoveries and send it to them, they submit it to two or three more researchers who act as “referees” – they judge the work and whether they think it’s good or not. They may suggest that you correct something, or perform some more checks on your results. After you do what they ask you to do, your paper usually gets published. There exists a system of “scores” which determines which journals are to be trusted more than others. Unfortunately, for many of these journals, you have to pay to read the papers they publish (and a lot!). Universities usually have subscriptions to the journals, so you can get as many papers as you want, but if you’re on your own, it’s a different matter. This is something I don’t really like about this system. There are free (“Open”) journals, but they are preciously few for now. Anyway, if you want to see how does a scientific paper look like, you can check out on Arxiv: http://uk.arxiv.org/. It’s a website where people puts on the drafts of their papers before they are published. Most of them are actually serious published papers that can be trusted – though sometimes the occasional joke paper gets through (like this paper about astrophysics in “Game of Thrones”: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0445).
Getting the whole world to agree on something is surprisingly simple if that something is right and can be verified by anyone! The elementary charge is one of these examples. Scientists throughout the world communicate a lot these days, always speaking English, so national boundaries do not matter as much as you may think. Of course some theories are not proven yet – and the world does not agree on those, but that’s exactly the point. A different problem is agreeing on measurement units. For those, there is an international society that sets the standards and compares all of them to the ones conserved inside a single laboratory – which can be found in Sevres, in France.
Serena commented on :
The first time I had a discovery I wanted to share with people, I traveled to a conference. I was doing research in Dublin in Ireland and I traveled to Cork to speak to scientists at a conference. I remember I was very nervous – I had prepared lots of slides explaining my results and why my findings were new. In the end, I had a really enjoyable experience.
To make thing official like you suggest in your question, I wrote my results up in a scientific paper. This is where you briefly discuss the research that has gone before you and explain how your results fit with this. Then you present what you did and how you did it. This is very important – you would like other people to be able to reproduce what you have done! You explain your results – if you have plotted a graph showing some change or if you have taken some important images with a microscopy, you carefully explain what it is they mean. Then you must make a conclusion about your findings. Once you have written your paper, you submit it to a journal. This is like a magazine for scientists – a collection of papers get published by a journal (this can be every week or so). Your paper gets submitted to an editor who reads it and sends it to a group of anonymous scientists (called reviewers) in order to judge how good your paper is. These reviewers make a recommendation about whether the journal should publish your work. This process is to make sure everything is fairly decided. If you want to check out an example of a journal, have a look at this webpage for Nanoscale:
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/nr/staff.asp
I have just started as one of the associate editors of this journal – it is mainly for papers in nanotechnology. So far, it’s been a very enjoyable experience!
Josh commented on :
There are a couple of ways we can share our discoveries with other people. The most important way is to publish your research in a science journal, like a science magazine full of research papers. You submit your work to the journal, and then some other scientists in your field have a look at it and decide if it should be published. When you publish, you’re teeling the world about your research! The other main way we tell people about our work is by going to conferences. Lots of scientists who are interested in particular research areas will go along to a conference and talk about their work.
There are definitely different opinions about the results of research. But the debate is part of what makes science work! People try and prove or disprove theories, and in doing that we learn lots more about things. It can be hard having someone tell you they think you’re wrong, but they’re really just trying to make your work better. As people do more and more experiments on something, they become more confident in the results they get. And if you can predict the result of a new experiment based on your theory, that’s more likely to get accepted.
When it comes to important constants like elementary charge or the speed of light etc, there is generally very good agreement on what those values are. Normally there are international institutions set up to work out those number more and more accurately. So, for example, there’s an institute in Paris that keeps the standard kilogram locked up in a vault!! It’s a chunk of metal 😀