• Question: what sorts of experiments do you do day to day ? from luke and isla

    Asked by islamg1999 to Ellie, Carol, John, Philip, Rebecca on 25 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by nuttellaz.
    • Photo: John Welford

      John Welford answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi Luke and Isla! I do a lot of computer simulation in my work, so I spend a lot of time building and running computer models of motors.

      I need to know whether the results from the simulations are right though. So I also have to do experiments with the real motors too.

      Actually doing the experiments doesn’t take up too much time. A lot more of my time is spent planning and preparing for the experiments, building models and test equipment to do the tests. I think this is the same with a lot of Science.

      One of the main reasons I’m making computer models is that they are a lot easier to do experiments with than real motors as I don’t need to build all the test equipment!

    • Photo: Rebecca Lacey

      Rebecca Lacey answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi Isla and Luke!

      I also spend most of my time working on statistical models; I use statistics to estimate what might be happening in the real world and trying to explain this.

    • Photo: Carol White

      Carol White answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi Luke, Isla and islamg1999!

      At the moment I’m looking at the seafloor creatures in my experiments – which is always exciting!

      I fed my experiments some food that had lots (and lots and lots and lots!) of carbon 13 (usually very rare in the environment) in it. Then I did different experiments with different levels of oxygen. So now I’m going to identify the different creatures that were eating the food (by seeing how much of the carbon 13 they have in them).

      I’m finding some creatures are very greedy, some don’t like not having oxygen and hide away, while some take advantage of the strange environment!

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