• Question: who do you think will discover the next revelation

    Asked by do7you7wanna7die to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 20 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      nice question. The thing about science that most people don’t realise is that it’s full of surprises. We don’t know where the next big idea will come from….if we did then we would have published it already. For example no one saw the theory of relativity coming, no one even dreamed about a theory like that. It took the genius of one man, Einstein, to discover it.
      So I can’t tell you who, or when, or what…..but that’s part of the buzz of science.

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      As Tim says, we don’t know in advance. Sometimes it is even difficult to figure out afterwards who did it. Take the Higgs boson, for example, the last really big discovery made in science. Two LHC experiments found it at the same time, and these experiments are run by huge international collaborations of about 3000 scientists each. There are thus two publications with a total of about 6000 names on the author list that claim the discovery of the Higgs boson. Many of these 6000 people did not look at the data at all, but they are authors on these papers because they built the experiment, or actually sat in the control room and ran it. Who of these 6000 people *actually* discovered the Higgs boson for the very first time? I don’t know, even though I *am* one of the 6000 people who supposedly did it. 🙂
      But ok, even though I just explained that we can’t tell who is discovering what and when, I will place a bet. I’d say the next big discovery will be announced in March 2016, again by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, and it will be a very mysterious particle. The reason I am saying that is that we are currently working on improving the LHC. When it will be switched on again, in early 2015, it will have almost double the energy it had so far. That’s our best chance ever to discover new particles. But such discoveries take many months of data taking (sometimes even years, but I choose to be optimistic 🙂 ), and so it won’t be until about end of 2015 that we find something really interesting and are confident enough about it to make it public. But then we won’t publish it rightaway, but usually we wait for a major international conference to announce the results on, and the next one would be the Moriond winter conference in March 2016.
      Planning is everything. 😉

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 21 Nov 2013:

      If I knew that, it wouldn’t be a revelation! That’s the thing about science, most of the truly exciting discoveries were never predicted, and the person who discovered them was usually a practically unknown person.

      That is slowly changing now. Physics experiments are becoming more and more expensive (we’ve already done most of the cheap stuff!), which require many thousands of scientists to run. So most of the great discoveries of recent times were made through the efforts of many individuals, not just one.

      I would argue that we haven’t had a real scientific revelation in a very, very long time now.

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