• Question: why do you like science?

    Asked by ccook to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by salvatore, yazmine, giuola.
    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      I love it because I think it’s a huge privilege to be able to spend your life trying to figure out what the world is made of and how it works. Everybody is familiar with what goes on at the surface – with all the things we can see. But what is a real thrill for me is to be able to investigate things that are normally invisible.

      My particular passion is for the molecules that work together in cells to keep us alive. The workings of just one cell are unbelievably complicated and we don’t really have a good understanding of how all the pieces work together. The research that I do is trying to see what some of the pieces look like. But there are thousands and thousands of them, so we still have a long way to go!

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      I really enjoy finding out how things work. I love it that there’s so much we don’t understand, and I really get a kick out of finding out something new.

    • Photo: Steve Roser

      Steve Roser answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Phew another big question. I like science because it lets me look at the world in all sorts of interesting ways. With science you get the chance to see what is going on behind things, and more importantly to predict things and to guess what might happen next. This is a terribly important part of our lives I think. Think of climate change. There has been a long fight (still going on) between people who says that if try and understand too much you destroy the beauty of things – Keats the poet said that Newton the scientist had destroyed the glory of nature by looking too closely….

      …Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
      Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
      Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
      Unweave a rainbow……

      but I think that being able to understand the physics of a rainbow, explain why you get it under certain conditions of weather, see why you get the colours in that order makes it more beautiful, not less.

    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      What a brilliant question! I like science because it is so challenging and so amazing! I am so awed by the universe and trying to understand how it works and where it’s going…what happened at the Big Bang? How did planets form? What will happen when the sun burns out? How can you not be excited by those questions?!

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