• Question: What do other scientists think about your work? Do they believe in your work?

    Asked by anon-201772 to Emily, Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Andy on 4 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201732, anon-201746, anon-201686.
    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      So some of the people in my group think what I do is a little nuts, probably because it’s different to the rest of what they do.

      In a wider sense, getting other scientists to believe my work is about presenting that work to them in talks or in published papers. I have to be very open about what my analysis involves and papers come with “peer review” where others will read and critique the work to sort of check I haven’t just made things up. In sharing my work it’s also about showing how it relates to all the other existing work out there and why they share conclusions or why my stuff differs and providing evidence for that.

    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Most scientists or engineers are actually quite interested in the work that Materials scientists carry out. To many engineers and scientists, materials scientist is a new subject and in some ways, I think that this makes it a refreshing topic for them. It’s not just Physics, Chemistry, Maths or Engineering, it’s something in-between. That means almost anyone can understand bits of it, so it makes for good discussions!

      For example, particle physicists at CERN use large superconducting wires to generate confining magnetic fields for their experiments. The physicists can calculate how the wires need to behave to generate the right field but material scientists are required to actually implement this. Scientists definitely believe in the end results that Material Scientists can deliver.

      This also makes my job fun as I get to interact with lots of difference science and talk to people who are much better than me in their fields!

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Ha! I think most scientists would say our work is clever but irrelevant. Just a guess. There’s some truth to that — it doesn’t matter that much to humanity if we discover something more about protons by tomorrow or a year from now, for example. But I think in the big picture discovering our universe and pushing boundaries is a key aspect of being human and that it’s wonderful that so many countries fund top scientists to work together internationally on this. There are paybacks as well: to push the science boundaries we also need to push technology to new limits, and that often leads to things that can be turned into something closer to people’s everyday experience, like medical scanners. In the long run, I suspect we’ll need to know this stuff to generate power cleanly forever and to venture out into the cosmos.

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I haven’t had chance to present my work to the wider scientific community yet, hopefully I’ll present some work at conferences later this year so I’ll know then what people think of my work (a scary thought)!

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Scientists might think that their own work is most important, maybe because they want to get more of that precious science funding money!
      But I would hope that scientists all value the work of other scientists, since all real science research is very worthwhile
      I hope @Andy thinks positively and believes in my work, since we’re working on the same experiment! (it’s a big experiment).

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      I think in general most scientists are supportive of other research because it’s all for the same cause, increasing how much we know and making things that help other people. Some of it fits quite nicely together as well, as George says his work on materials can be used to help lots of other experiments.

      However when it comes to very new not well understood things there can be lots of arguing! For instance I think chloride salts are the best ones for molten salt fast reactors, but other scientists think fluorides would be better. And there are lots of arguments to be made for both sides- so there is a lot of ‘discussion’ (arguing)

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