• Question: What is your favourite science subject? e.g. chemistry/reproduction

    Asked by hannah0090 to Antonia, Douglas, Hugh, Matt, Tom on 20 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by biggusdiggus.
    • Photo: Antonia Hamilton

      Antonia Hamilton answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      psychology / neuroscience. that is what I study.

    • Photo: Tom Hardy

      Tom Hardy answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Chemistry!

    • Photo: Matthew Hurley

      Matthew Hurley answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      I’m involved with medicine and microbiology which is a mix of all the sciences! (Not very good at physcics though).

    • Photo: Hugh Roderick

      Hugh Roderick answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      My favourite science subject is Circadian rhythms, which is how all plants and animals and some bacteria can tell what time of day it is. They are why we are hungry at certain times of day and why we get jetlag, how plants know the best time to flower and know when and where to move their leaves to get the most sunlight throughout the day. The genes responsible for causing circadian rhythms are also very similar between plants and animals, suggesting that it is a mechanism that is one of the basic processes of higher life and evolved before the evolutionary split between plants and animals, which happened when most life was still just single cells billions of years ago.

    • Photo: Douglas Blane

      Douglas Blane answered on 20 Jun 2010:

      I guess it depends if you mean favourite to do or favourite to learn about.

      What got me into science in the first place was looking at photos of distant galaxies, like this http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080124.html

      My brain also got blown away by the enormous size of the universe, when I looked at images like this: http://go2spacenow.com/earth-size-vs-other-planets-and-stars/

      I’m also fascinated by what the world is like at the very small scale that experiments like the Large Hadron Collider tell us about. Quantum mechanics is very weird indeed.

      But although I’ve taught these parts of science at the Open University, I’ve never done research in them.

      My way of doing science – and engineering – is called mathematical modelling. It’s a great way to understand really complex things, like submarines, robots, bacteria and elephants.

      What you do is find the equations that describe what you’re studying, then set them up on a computer. You then have something called a simulation. It’s a bit like a computer game. In fact a lot of computer games are simulations.

      Once you’ve got your simulation you can ask all sorts of What if? questions about the real world and get answers from the simulation.

      It’s very powerful and can be a lot of fun too, as you play around and discover stuff you never knew before.

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