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Asked by Tom||12||Notts to Daniel, Freya, James, Miranda, Usman on 19 Jun 2015.
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Usman Bashir answered on 19 Jun 2015:
Learning the difficult maths & / quantum physics is very exciting and frustrating at the same time. You are motivated by the fascination of a new unknown theory / or equation. But frustrated when it is so difficult. Being a doctor, it took me several years to grasp a certain mathematical concept (Fourier transform – I can almost see the engineers smirk ), for example, and now that I understand it I know i could have understood it in 2 weeks!
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James Gilbert answered on 19 Jun 2015:
Ha, what Usman said about Fourier transforms is pretty funny – coming from an engineering background, I really don’t struggle with visualising and grasping FTs. Pure mathematics, on the other hand, is a totally different story! Working in an astrophysics department, I’m surrounded by people who seem to find mathematical concepts easy and I really really really don’t. 😐
Most exciting for me is dreaming something up in my mind – *seeing* how it should work, then making it a reality. That creative process gives me such a buzz (especially if it works as my mind told me it would!).
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Freya Wilson answered on 19 Jun 2015:
The most disturbing part is when you think you know something but then the outcome of an experiment completely blows your mind and isn’t what you are expecting!
For example this week we were working with some electromagnetic waves which shouldn’t be able to go through a metal box. The box is called a Faraday cage and electromagnetic radiation can’t get out of it. (This is the reason why you are safe in a car if there is lightening overhead.) However, when we lined everything up a certain way we were able to detect the radiation coming out of it! It makes absolutely no sense to us and is a bit disturbing because it means everything we thought we knew is wrong, or we were doing something completely wrong!
This is actually also one of the most exciting parts of my work 😀
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Miranda Jackson answered on 22 Jun 2015:
The most exciting thing is to come up with a new theory and test it. It’s pretty disturbing that you can spend years doing so, only to find out that the theory was wrong and you have to start over, but I guess that’s exciting too.
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