• Question: If you could make any scientific discovery, what would it be?

    Asked by jakespike98 to Chris, Dave, David, Fiona, Jack on 16 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by laurencrowe14.
    • Photo: Jack Miller

      Jack Miller answered on 16 Jun 2013:

      Hi Jakespike98,

      One of the things about truly great discoveries is that they’re completely unexpected — therefore, asking what I’d like to discover in the future is somewhat unfair — I don’t know what I really don’t know!

      If, on the other hand, you’re asking what discovery in the past I’d have like to have made, that’s a much better (and harder!) question. There are many ideas that have revolutionised our understanding of the world. The basic idea that everything around us is made up of atoms is probably the biggest one of these, and the knowledge how to prove that this is the case is fairly astounding too — we can see atomic structures directly through modern microscopy techniques such as atomic force microscopy (have a look at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/aug/27/molecules-revealed-in-all-their-glory-by-microscope for some pretty pictures).

      It might seem relatively basic, but our entire society now revolves around this idea — everything from medicine to the way we communicate has only really been made possible after people realised that the “atomic hypothesis” was correct!

      I look forward to hearing what everyone else thinks, however!

      — Jack

    • Photo: Dave Farmer

      Dave Farmer answered on 16 Jun 2013:

      Hi Jake,

      As Jack says above, it is somewhat of an impossible question, I agree that the most exciting discovery’s are the unexpected ones!

      One thing that I can think of that would revolutionise the world pretty quickly would be a material that is superconducting at room temperature. A superconductor is a material that has zero resistance to an electric current flowing through it. They allow us to manipulate very large electric and magnetic fields without the normal problems of things heating up due to resistance. An example of their use is in the magnets that bend the particle beam around it’s track at the Large Hadron Collider. Currently, we’ve only found ones that work at very low temperatures (I think the record high temperature is -135 degrees!). One that worked at room temperature would, I believe, lead to a leap forward in technology. Incidentally, it would likely make me very rich as well! Although that’s not the reason I do science, I’m sure I could find something to do with the money…

      Dave

    • Photo: David Freeborn

      David Freeborn answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Hi jakespike98,

      My dream (an unlikely dream, but still my dream) would be to uncover the so called “Grand Unified Theory” that describes the entire universe.

      As physics has progressed, we’ve discovered it’s possible to describe many of the forces with a single equation- electricity and magnetism were unified in the 19th century, and today most of the forces are unified. But gravity seems to be incompatible with all the other forces, and nobody understands why.

      If we could unify all the forces together, then we could describe all of the universe in a single line of work. In principle, we would have total knowledge.

      In practice, there would still be a lot of interesting things to discover!

    • Photo: Fiona Coomer

      Fiona Coomer answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      The discovery closest related to what I work on, that would have the biggest impact on the world, would be to discover a room temperature superconductor. At the moment, materials that superconduct (conduct electricity with no resistance at all) when cooled by liquid nitrogen, have been discovered. But if we discovered a material that could do this at room temperature, we could make electricity cables out of it, and it would go a long way to decreasing the world’s energy problems.

    • Photo: Chris Mansell

      Chris Mansell answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I would like to discover something that really increases our understanding of the parts of the world that we currently need quantum mechanics to describe. Quantum mechanics is great at telling us how to calculate what will happen in our experiments. The concepts involved in the theory are really mind-blowing. I really want to get to the heart of these concepts.

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