Question: Do you think that you are close to finding the answer, the solution, to your work?

Ian Cade answered on 10 Nov 2014:

Ah, there’s always more to do! (hopefully, from a career point of view at least)

The course of progress in an academic lab often follows this path:

Initial idea -> lab work -> results -> modify lab work -> better results -> publish (whee!) -> notice something new about the area of you research, often based on your newly published work… and start again.

At the moment I have just published a paper and am finishing off an interesting side project one of our masters students did last year. This was simply a series of 4 new related compounds exhibiting an odd solvent dependant isomerism… and in looking at this it seems there is an unexpected intramolecular interaction (essentially the shape of the molecule) in one of the compounds, which in itself might be worth looking at a little more closely.

So… in answer to your question… no… in the sense that I might have particular short range goals but the ultimate aim is to understand the universe… which is really rather big! (its worth noting that human science really only has a good grasp of ‘real matter and energy’ which bizzarly only makes up 5% of the total stuff in the universe!)