• Question: How long do you think it will take to conclude the experiments and research?

    Asked by storz001 to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Christine Switzer

      Christine Switzer answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      It depends on the experiments. Some of my fire experiments are over in minutes. Our first attempt burning a scale model of a building took months to set up and the model building was destroyed in less than three minutes by the fire. Other experiments take a really long time to run. I do some water quality work where we need to collect data for a year or more before we can find meaningful results.

    • Photo: Nicolas Biber

      Nicolas Biber answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I have an experiment running that I started in August last year, and for which the final data will only be collected months after (I hope!) I finish my PhD. I am looking at how plastics fall apart when they are exposed in the environment, so that takes a long time.

    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      For a PhD, which is what I’m doing right now, usually all of the experiments on your chosen topic have to be finished within 3 or 4 years. Different experiments, like Christine said, take different lengths of time to do. The last experiment I did lasted about 4 weeks. I’m doing another one at the moment that should only take a few days.

      Science will never reach a conclusion though – there will always be more questions to answer!

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I hope my research will never finish – I always have more questions and more ideas!

      However, I usually try to work on seperate projects at a time. Each project will usually have a number of experiments to be run.

      Many of the experiments I do use computer simulations. These are usually very quick to run (a few minutes) but you have to try lots of different simulations before you can be sure you’ve covered all the posibilities. However, even then running a computer simulation is still quicker than running a ‘real’ experiment.

      Some of the real experiments we are trying to run take a long time as we are still trying to set up the right equipment. For example we want to film swimming plankton (small bugs that live in water) but to film in 3-d requires lots of cameras attached to microscopes and this is very difficult to set up – we haven’t got it working properly yet!

    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Yeah I agree that it depends on the experiment that you are doing. Sometimes I have quite different results for the same experiment because the behavior of the cells are unpredictable sometimes! So it means I will have to repeat it until I see some consistency then I can conclude my work!
      For my PhD- I am given 3 years to do lab work and 1 year to write up but I think my supervisor wants me to do the lab work and write up in 3 years so I have to work a bit harder and faster!

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