• Question: how does science make you feel?

    Asked by eziornic to Helen, Jenni, Mark, Martin, Stu on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Stuart Mourton

      Stuart Mourton answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Science makes me feel a whole range of emotions! Sometimes it’s frustration that I can’t get an experiment to run how I wish (the speakers on a computer based lab task I was running just stopped working last week!!! Grrrrrr!!), other times it can fill you with elation when you have a breakthrough. In between these is a general feeling of pride, satisfaction at doing a job I enjoy and hopefully making a difference. That’s the feeling I think I feel most of the time. Helping a student understand a topic or completing some analysis on a research project and finding interesting and meaningful results makes you feel pretty good!

    • Photo: Helen O'Connor

      Helen O'Connor answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      The best feeling is when someone tells me that I have helped them do better at whatever they wanted to achieve. I also feel really motivated to get up each day. This is because every day is different – I might see an athlete who has a competition coming up and wants help preparing their ‘mental skills’ (this week I am working with someone who is doing an Ironman competition on Sunday and is feeling nervous about it) or I might go into a gym to give a talk to people about why exercise is good for you. I also have my research projects to work on and articles to write, so I never get bored.

    • Photo: Jenni Tilley

      Jenni Tilley answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      interest / fascination / excitement

      I love that science helps us understand the world around us, and that we can use that understanding to develop new objects, devices, etc. I particularly love it when we come by that understanding by accident! For example, in 1985 a man called Roentgen ‘discovered’ X-rays quite by accident while he was investigating the properties of electricity. Before this discovery, the only way to see inside the human body was to cut it open.

    • Photo: Mark Burnley

      Mark Burnley answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      That’s quite a hard question to answer. My answer is that it makes me feel good most of the time, but also bad some of the time. If you’re working on a hard problem (and they all seem hard because nobody knows the right answer, which is the whole point!), then making progress is one of the best feelings in the world, because you might have discovered something new, or confirmed that something actually works the way it should do. Other times, science be very frustrating. You can do a lot of experiments that don’t produce any meaningful results, or it can take ages and ages to analyse data to get the results that do mean something, but whilst your doing that it can be boring or annoying. Then there is publishing the results. We send our results to journals hoping they will be good enough, and when they are and the paper is accepted that’s great, but every scientist I know has had a paper rejected (usually many papers rejected), and that’s not a good feeling!

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