• Question: whats your faviorite thing about science?

    Asked by vithurules to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 20 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      My favourite thing about science is that you never know what you are going to be doing even in a few weeks time. Science is like being a detective, you follow the clues and try to build up a picture of what’s happening but the only thing you can be sure of is that something unexpected will happen. Someone will have a new idea that turns everything on its head and you have to ditch a whole way of thinking a start a new way. So it’s endlessly refreshing. Science is more like art than people think. You have to be very creative and think outside the box whenever possible. I really recommend it!

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      Humans have always tried to understand how nature works. Up to a few thousand years ago (and for some people still today 🙂 ) it all seemed so complicated, that they couldn’t imagine it to work in any other way than some kind of super-human beings, or gods, controlling it. But of course this kind of explanation is quite poor, because it doesn’t give you any guarantees that if you do A, the result is B. All you can do is increase your chances of getting B (or maybe not?) by sacrificing a lamb and hoping for the best. 🙂

      But at some point humans discovered that nature does follow exact and perfectly predictable laws. Enter science. Movement of stars, even “special features” such as solar eclipses could actually be predicted with ever increasing precision. Eventually pretty much everything else in nature followed. We can predict how quickly a stone will fall, how a planet moves, how a proton reacts with another proton, how an image on your retina leads to electric patterns in your brain and so on and so forth.

      Science pretty much is the instruction manual for the universe. The mere fact that such a thing exists is absolutely amazing. There are still a few typos in it, and the current edition is still missing a few chapters, but for me this is why science is really cool.

      RTFM! 😉

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 21 Nov 2013:

      Hi vithurules. That’s a difficult question! There’s so much to like.

      I guess my favorite thing about science is how it builds upon previous discoveries. When people discover new things in science, they aren’t starting from scratch; they’re standing on the shoulders of the millions of scientists that have come before them and each contributed something small to the sum total of all human knowledge. Even small advances will someday lead to something great, and every experiment and discovery will be useful to future scientists. It’s like we’re all weaving a giant tapestry of knowledge thread by thread.

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