• Question: what is your knowledge based on

    Asked by dozzy3 to Daniel, Freya, James, Miranda, Usman on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Daniel Hewson

      Daniel Hewson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Oscar Wilde: ‘A man either knows nothing or everything. Which are you?’
      He’s right in that relatively we know nothing but, I do believe we have the potential to know all things!

    • Photo: Freya Wilson

      Freya Wilson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      So when people think up their ideas and test them out they publish them in books called journals. They’re mostly online now. But even as far back as Isaac Newton and him discovering gravity he wrote his ideas out and had to publish them. So I get my knowledge based on reading things other people have thought out and published.

      Every day I check out the new articles written in journals, online to see if there is anything I want to read more about. And if I come up with something good, then I write about it and that gets published so others can read about the stuff I know too.

      There are lots of people looking into ways of using science to do secret communications, so I check out things they have written and learn about them so I can build on that.

    • Photo: Usman Bashir

      Usman Bashir answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Well my knowledge is based on reading textbooks on electromagnetism physics, high school maths, and medicine. I believe textbooks coupled with lectures – however boring – form the basis of our knowledge.

      However, books and lectures usually only take you as far as Bachelors or Masters level in your field. To specialize as a scientist (PhD level and beyond) one has to read latest research in the form of ‘research articles’ – short essays in scientific journals ( for example e=mc2 first appeared in a 3 page research article by Einstein in 1905). So that is what I am doing to further my knowledge these days.

    • Photo: James Gilbert

      James Gilbert answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      If you mean ‘where do i get my knowledge?’ then it’s a combination of things. The internet plays a huge part in my day-to-day learning of things. I have an engineering degree which I sometimes ‘use’, but it’s not always relevant.

      As a practical scientist you become very good at knowing a little bit about a lot of things. If you need to know something that you don’t know, then go and find out and then carry on! This is one of the reasons I love my job so much.. a bit of everything!

      Actually, you might be surprised how many times my work simply requires a knowledge of simple geometry! Triangles triangles triangles. Trust me, that stuff is uber useful.

    • Photo: Miranda Jackson

      Miranda Jackson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      My knowledge is based a bit on what I learned in school and in university, but mostly on how I have learned to apply that information to the projects I have worked on. I do my best to learn something new every day, even if it is not related to my field of study.

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