Question: what makes your research different to prevous research?

Paul Stevenson answered on 15 Mar 2010:

My research, like most science, builds a bit on what went before. So, the sort of things I do that are new is to take existing models of nuclear forces (the force that keeps protons and neutrons stuck together in nuclei) and see in what ways they make good predictions of observed things, like the size and mass of nuclei, then I try to work out ways to improve the forces – so in that sense I am coming up with improved versions of the nuclear force, which are different to the old versions.