• Question: soo what wwould you to to try and tell someone how brilliant science is

    Asked by clairep225 to David, Luna, Mark, Melanie, Probash on 22 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Luna Munoz

      Luna Munoz answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Science can solve a lot of problems that we encounter in our lives. With science, we can progress to help children become metally healthy and productive members of society. For example, one of the things I was involved in was helping to identify the younger siblings of young offenders. I helped to create the methods to assess these children so that we could get them help. In this way, we can prevent these at-risk kids from geting involved in antisocial behaviour. This saves society from a lot of damage caused by antisocial behaviour and, in turn, money. It also should give the children a better outlook on life.

    • Photo: Melanie Stefan

      Melanie Stefan answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      It depends. Most probably, if I could, I wouldn’t tell them, but take them to the lab and show them. Unless it’s someone very theoretically minded, in which case I’d explain why we know that there are infinitely many prime numbers. It’s fantastic.

    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 19 Mar 2011:

      There are many ways I can think of doing this. One might be to show them an experiment (with relevance to something in everyday life?), or a simple explanation of some amazing aspect of nature.

      Perhaps, though, the best way would be through a personal story of discovery. Early in my PhD, I was trying to think of a way to measure the size of volcanic eruptions. The answer came to me while I was on a bus, thinking about something else – and over the next couple of months I realised that I had found something that was almost so obvious that no one else had spotted it. There isn’t much that compares to the excitement of seeing things fall into place, and realising that you can suddenly do things that haven’t been done before.

    • Photo: Mark Vesey

      Mark Vesey answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      I’d try and give examples of the wonderful things it has achieved such as the latest technologies and the understandings we have gained from science – I think this would impress anyone

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