• Question: What is the most challenging experiment you have ever done?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I have never done any experiment (at least, not since I left undergrad, when we had mandatory labs). I think it would be to make an oscilloscope work (it you know what it is, you know it means I am VERY VERY bad in a lab. Actually, I am pretty much a catastrophe in a lab, if I enter everything stops working!) or to map the Fourier modes of a drum, but it’s not really a true experiment in the sense that’s it’s to teach undergrads, it’s not something that’s not been done before. It looks like this:

      or

      But in my work as a scientist, what I do are calculations. The most challenging calculation I’ve ever done took me 150 pages and about 4 months to figure out. At the end I realized I did it completely wrong, and the answer took me 3-4 pages to derive.

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      All my experiments are with telescopes, taking images of far away stars. To be able to do that, you need to be able to point your telescope exactly at the star you want, to make sure that you aren’t getting confused with another one. That is pretty difficult sometimes, especially with a big telescope. The telescope I normal work with has a mirror that is 8 meters across, that is huge! That is like more than 4 people stood one on top of the other. Then we need to take that mirror and point it to a star with an accuracy of better than 1000th of a degree. Imagine that? It’s difficult to measure half a degree with a compass nevermind point an 8 meter mirror at a point with an accuracy of better than 0.001 degrees! That is challenging and it’s before we’ve even started doing the experiment!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      haha, It’s always challenging to “perform on the spot”! Many experiments are easy to do if you take time to understand what’s going on, but if you have a load of people watching you, it’s easy to miss something and then the whole thing doesn’t work!!!

      That’s hard!

Comments