• Question: How do you find the right equipment to do a experiment?

    Asked by anon-282398 on 2 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Karen Burstow

      Karen Burstow answered on 2 Mar 2021:

      You choose the equipment you need based on what you’re trying to find out, using a combination of what you’ve learnt in your studies and in your previous experience of practical work. Plus you can always ask a senior colleague, tutor or teacher for help!

    • Photo: Chris Waller

      Chris Waller answered on 2 Mar 2021: last edited 2 Mar 2021 9:05 am

      Part of designing an experiment is figuring out what question you are trying to ask, and what you need to do to get an answer. Figuring out what equipment you need is a part of that process. Asking your teachers, colleagues, bosses or other researchers in your field is often a great way to figure out what experiment you need to do, and what equipment you need to do it.

      In my work I do this a bit backwards as I already know what equipment I am going to be using before I start – the machines I use are expensive so my company can’t go and buy a new one for every experiment we want to do. Instead the challenge for me is to figure out how I can use what we already have to answer the questions I am trying to ask.

    • Photo: Tim Burrow

      Tim Burrow answered on 2 Mar 2021:

      For me, the best way to find the right equipment is to discuss this with the beamline scientists at the synchrotrons I go to for my experiments, they help set up the experiment beamline before we show up and then I run the experiment with my supervisor (and other folks in our research group). Luckily at synchrotrons, they will have everything we need and if there is something we will be able to design the equipment and make it onsite!

      But there are many people around us that are very useful to talk to about designing experiments!

    • Photo: Callum Thomas

      Callum Thomas answered on 2 Mar 2021:

      A very important part of being a scientist is communicating and cooperating with other scientists. Often a big part of planning an experiment involves reading a lot about experiments other people have done before to work out whether the equipment or techniques they used could be helpful to answer your own questions. This is also why it’s very important for us to write down exactly what equipment we used and what steps we took when we did our experiments, to help other people who might want to do similar experiments in the future. Also lots of scientists will talk to others with more experience in using specific equipment to ask for help – we like to work together a lot to solve problems!

    • Photo: Anna Westland

      Anna Westland answered on 2 Mar 2021: last edited 2 Mar 2021 3:09 pm

      First off, you decide what you want to find out (your question). Then you decide what you need to measure. And after that you can decide which equipment will be best to do this.
      Sometimes you have a few different options, and you might have to decide between these based on more practical things like cost, speed, size, or if you already have the equipment in the lab.
      For example – you can scan skeletons using a CT-scanner, like you’d have at a hospital. But this is quite slow and expensive, and you need to take your skeletons to somewhere with a CT scanner. So at the moment I’m using another kind of equipment that I can carry around in a suitcase!

    • Photo: Jo Brodie

      Jo Brodie answered on 4 Mar 2021:

      From my own experience it’s been fairly unusual to start a new experiment or research project without most, if not all, of the equipment you’d need already in place. Most (lab-based) experiments tend to build on previous work. Sometimes you might need a bit of equipment that’s slightly different – improved in some way: eg it can handle more samples per minute, or it does something faster, or it can measure even tinier amounts (or uses less energy, or even the spare parts just cost less!). Sometimes there’s a completely new and better way of doing something and a lab will need (and want) to get some whizzy new bit of kit – perhaps even ‘bespoke’ (where very few are made and they’re for a very specific purpose).
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      If a scientist hasn’t used a particular bit of equipment before then there are lots of things that can help them decide if it’ll be useful to them. Other scientists will have published their work (‘papers’) in scientific journals and those papers will say what equipment they used and how they did used it – so a scientist wanting to find out more may be able to get the information they need just by reading the literature. If not they can contact the scientists who wrote the paper and ask for advice. There are also lots of online communities (email mailing lists, social media) where scientists can talk about techniques and equipment and share improvements to the method that they’ve developed.
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      When I worked in labs I used some fancy equipment (eg a gas chromatograph – which separates a complex mixture into its components, and a mass spectrometer – which measures how much there is of each component) but I also used some fairly ordinary equipment like computers and things like pH meters (which tell you if your solution is just right… or too acid, or to alkali) but they were already there in the lab. In fact I went to work in those labs because I needed to access that sort of equipment (mass spectrometer), which is another way of finding the right equipment, moving to where it is! We also had amazing lab technicians who could create new bits and pieces of equipment (and replace broken ones, oops!) that we might need too.
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      So the equipment you’d need will depend on the type of science you’re doing and where you’re doing it (might not even be in a lab) and also and your budget.
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      There’s also a very literal answer to your ‘how do you find’ the equipment which is that there are catalogues (big thick books, or online versions) of scientific apparatus and equipment and people working in labs can order what they need. Here’s a very old one – “A catalogue of scientific instruments”, from 1916 https://archive.org/details/catalogueofscien00lekn/mode/2up (you can use the arrow keys to zip back and forth inside the book).
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      Jo

    • Photo: Lizzie Pendlington

      Lizzie Pendlington answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      Research first of all! You need to plan your objective or hypothesis for your experiment and then come up with a method which is based on work other people have done. Then talking with other scientists like the technicians in the lab (who help make sure everything is running ok in the lab) to get a plan together 🥼

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