• Question: Do all scientists do the same experiments or do all scientists do different experiments? If you do the same experiments do you all know that you are doing the same experiment?

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Lynne Thomas

      Lynne Thomas answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      All scientists work on different experiments but we sometimes are trying to find out the answers to the same questions. We often work together in big teams sometimes across the world! We quite often use the same equipment but to look at different materials. All of us in this zone use a big facility called Diamond Light Source but we all look at different things. Within Diamond there are nearly 30 different machines which help us to look at answering different questions. Some of them are used more by biologists, some more by chemists and others more by physicists and material scientists!

      There are still so many questions that we need to answer and if we all tried to answer the same one we wouldn’t make much progress in understanding the world!

    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      There are a lot of unanswered questions in science – enough for everyone to do lots of different experiments! However, the most interesting questions appeal to more scientists and so some people will be doing the same or similar experiments. Science is a competitive field and there is pressure to get results and publish them before other people working on the same experiments. Sometimes you might get “scooped” that’s where someone publishes what you are working on before you do.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Every scientist is usually working on a different question (although there are sometimes people in different parts of the world working on the same thing who are racing to get there first).

      We often use the same techniques to get to our answer. Like Lynne said, everybody in this “I’m a Scientist” zone goes to Diamond Light Source for some our experiments.

      We also work in groups – a few people doing very similar work. It’s likely that you use very similar techniques to other people working in your group.

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