Question: whats is like being a scientist?

James Bell answered on 20 Jun 2014:

Good question – because science is a really big topic and involves millions of people, personal experience of science is probably very different for different people but I can talk about more general things and my own experience a bit.

Being a scientist is all about asking questions. The key to being a good scientist is to observe your environment (e.g. how a species behaves) and think of good questions to ask to explain its behaviour. Once you have these questions, you think about ways you can design experiments so that you can answer those questions in a scientific way.

When I say ‘in a scientific way’ what I mean is you think of ways you can convert your questions into numbers that you can then decide, using statistics, on your answer. For example, say you want to know if people who have blonde hair are normally taller than people with brown hair. To work out whether that’s really true, you would measure the heights of lots of different people from different parts of the area you are studying. This would give you two sets of numbers, one for heights of blonde people and one for heights of brown-haired people. The numbers would obviously vary a bit because people aren’t all the same height (and this variation is important for how you analyse the data). The statistics you use would tell you what chance there was that, based on all the people in your study, blonde people really were taller than brown-haired people. If it did turn out to be true, then your next question might be why are blonde people taller.

This is a very general description of the process of science and because of this structure of always asking new questions, we are able to learn virtually anything about our universe.

Questions -> Experiments -> Results and Analysis -> More questions

My own personal experience? I’m an ecologist which means I study how animals interact with their environments and how different environments determine what types of animals live where. So I would start with the question ‘does area A have different species to area B?’ Next, I collect animals from each place, work out what they are and what they eat (amongst other things) and use statistics to work out the answer to my question. The data I produce almost always throws up new questions, so there’s always new things to look in to.

That last sentence is one of the great things about science – there’s always more to learn. Yes, it can be a hard job and that’s in part because scientists are often the world experts in their field, they’re at the front line of knowledge and as such, we often get things wrong. Science is a very mature concept and self-corrects itself over time (we know lots of things that were believed in the past aren’t actually true – like the idea the the plague was spread by ‘bad air’) because scientists are always asking questions about the world and the truth eventually comes out – even if we need very complicated machines to find that out (I’m thinking of the CERN large hadron collider in particular)

That’s a very long answer I know, maybe I’ve gotten carried away. I’ll try to sum it up here…

Science is about learning and most of all you need to be interested in what you research. It’s a very rewarding job because we get to do lots of different things and always learn new things about the world (and get to talk to other people about what we discover – which is what I’m a Scientist is all about I think)