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Asked by laurayaxley to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 13 Jun 2011.
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Christine Switzer answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Honestly, it depends on the question. Answers come easy to some questions but others take a lot longer (months, or years even). A lot of the work I do, there is no right answer, just one or more good answers. An example is choosing a way to clean contaminated land. It is rare that one method working on its own will be good enough to complete the job. We have to choose methods that achieve what we need with the budget available.
Sometimes when thinking about the questions that my colleagues and I are asking, our first answer may be wrong. We have a whole teaching module in my department about learning from failures, because often, you can learn more when people get things wrong rather than when they get them right. In my own research, I am pursuing a topic in which my first observation was completely wrong. Realising that I might be wrong, I was able to design some experiments to show clearly whether or not my initial observation was correct. It wasn’t. Science is filled with fascinating mistakes. People like to talk about penicillin in this way and there are tonnes of other mistakes that turned out to be really helpful instead.
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Nicolas Biber answered on 13 Jun 2011:
I find that questions are the most difficult thing to think of. It’s always obvious what you want to do and what you want to ‘find out’. But then you have to put this in a question that you can answer with yes or no. And you want to put that question the exact right way, because you know that you will spend months trying to answer it. Questions in science are more important than most people think.
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Jessica Chu answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Yeah I agree with Nicolas, sometimes I think there is another side to asking questions.
I find that when I have to talk about my work, some people know so much that they keep asking questions around your area and things like – have you thought about doing your work this way or why did you not use that method instead?
Sometimes not because they are trying to catch you out rather it’s because they know other ways of doing things etc. so they ask why you preferred this way to the others!
This is quite good because it makes me think and explore different ways to do things sometimes or it might just simply be the method I am using is the better one for the stuff I am working on 🙂 -
Zara Gladman answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Yes, I think it’s important to think carefully about which questions we want to answer in science. Science costs money, and we don’t want to waste money finding out the answers to things that aren’t important. For example, if you had a choice between spending research money on the question ‘Do monkeys like listening to Lady GaGa?’ or ‘Can we develop a new drug to treat cancer?’, obviously it’s more important to us that we answer the second question!
Although it’s interesting to do science for the sake of science, I think it’s more useful to do science that can actually be used to answer real-world questions. ‘Applied ecology’ is a type of ecology that links science to real problems. There are many examples of applied ecology. One of my friends, for example, is studying a colony of seabirds that nest near a bit of land that developers are hoping to build housing on soon. It’s my friend’s job to study the birds closely and find out everything she can about them – where they feed, where they breed, what height they fly at. She will then pass this information onto the developers so that they know what height they can build their houses to, and what areas to avoid building close to that might disturb the birds’ feeding or breeding. A lot of my crayfish work is also very applied – my results will be used to help understand what we can do about the problem of invasive non-native species in the UK.
So in my view – yes, scientists do need to think hard about what questions they’re going to research the answer to… because money and time is limited, and some questions are more important than others!
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Edward Codling answered on 13 Jun 2011:
But do monkeys like Lady Gaga though? (I bet they do…)
Anyway, I agree with the scientists who got here before me. I think the problem for me is not so much coming up with questions to ask – I have hundreds of new questions I ask myself every day! Instead the hard part is working out which questions are sensible ones to ask, which ones I can actually do with the skills I have, and which ones will be relevant to people in the ‘real world’. This is particularly true with my computer simulation work – in theory I can do pretty much what I want with a simulation but making it useful is much more difficult.
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