• Question: What has been the most interesting scientific development in your field since you became a scientist?

    Asked by anon-267537 on 11 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Bradley Young

      Bradley Young answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      I’ve only been a ‘scientist’ really for a couple of years so nothing massive has happened in that time unfortunately. The biggest thing that I’m waiting for soon is when a nuclear fusion reactor has a nuclear gain factor greater than 1. This means that the nuclear reactor is producing more energy than it is taking in, meaning we could then (theoretically) start using it as an energy supply. Hopefully this will be happen soon because there are reactors being built to achieve this and it would be a massive development when it does happen.

    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 11 Nov 2020: last edited 11 Nov 2020 7:24 pm

      In astronomy, for me it was probably the detection of gravitational waves. It happened in 2015 and the result was published in 2016; the team in charge of LIGO got a Nobel prize for this in 2017.
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      Gravitational waves are tiny waves passing through spacetime, caused by gravity of objects around us. Basically, when a gravitational wave passes through you, you get a tiny bit more squished or stretched. It happens around us all the time! But the effect is so so small that we would never notice.
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      Well, when two black holes way out in space collide with each other, they cause lots of ripples through space and time and they eventually reach us. This is what LIGO saw: a series of gravitational waves from a black hole – black hole collision many light years away.
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      This is all really amazing. Before this, we sort of knew black holes are real but we’ve never seen one; we could guess they must collide but we didn’t really know; and we knew gravitational waves are predicted but didn’t know if they’re real. The 2015 LIGO observation changed all that!

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 12 Nov 2020:

      I think I can only call myself a scientist since I started my PhD really, but last year there was a super interesting development in the field of quantum technology! A huge team of researchers from all over the world demonstrated something called ‘quantum supremacy’ which is a big step towards building a quantum computer. They basically showed that (for a very specific task) their quantum computer outperformed a supercomputer. We still have a long way to go before this kind of technology is useful for problems we actually want to solve, but it was very exciting all the same!

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