• Question: What do you feel is the most important part of science, Biology, chemistry or physics?

    Asked by controlled_disorder to John, Laura, Luke, Rob, Ruth on 10 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Conor.
    • Photo: Laura Finney

      Laura Finney answered on 10 Jun 2016:

      I actually don’t think that either can exist without the other! I think we need them all and none are more important.
      I hope it doesn’t feel like I’ve dodged the question but I genuinely think that 🙂

    • Photo: Ruth Patchett

      Ruth Patchett answered on 10 Jun 2016:

      I am going to have to agree. Obviously I love chemistry the most but really they are hard to separate and I found when studying chemistry at university I also had modules which involved physics and biology too. If you think of it generally biology is the study of life (plants/animals), which are made up of atoms (chemistry) which are held together and move around using forces (physics). Some subjects are connected in ways i never would have expected physics and music (!?).

    • Photo: John Fossey

      John Fossey answered on 11 Jun 2016:

      Science is about the people who do it and not the sub genres we badge it as. I enjoy chemistry and feel I have more to offer chemistry, and that is about me. If I said chemistry is best -thats my feeling not a fact. Differentiating physics (tiny and super large), chemistry (very small) and biology (small and medium) is more a matter of the scale of the matter.
      So I guess we can say the mathematical elegance of the underlying rules of the universe are important, but I don’t want to say maths is more important than science – the tools we use to interpret and manipulate the world around us can be badged as a discipline but its more important to develop and select appropriate tools than claim any one area has more importance.

    • Photo: Luke Williams

      Luke Williams answered on 12 Jun 2016:

      I spend most of my time working across as many fields as I can squeeze into at any given moment, so its not a question I can answer really. I can start on Monday in Biology, end on Friday in Chemistry, and have spent most of the time in between meandering in Engineering.

      Whilst you have to teach science in different disciplines at the start, by the time you get to research, its pretty rare these days to rigidly stick to one area.

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