• Question: With all the scientific knowledge you have, what do you want to accomplish in the future?

    Asked by anonymous to Steve, Emma, Christian, Bose, Alice on 9 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Emma Dean

      Emma Dean answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      I feel like I still have so much to learn. There are so many unsolved problems in my field of physics it’s incredibly hard to say what exactly I would like to accomplish.

      I hope in my lifetime I will get to witness an explanation for dark energy (the stuff that is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate). That would be excellent!!

    • Photo: Alice Harpole

      Alice Harpole answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      Finish my PhD! In the longer term, I’d love to be able to expand the current model I’m working on to include more physical effects. The system I’m looking at (the surfaces of neutron stars) is very extreme and quite poorly understood, so there is lots of room for improvement. Ultimately, we hope that we can use this work to get a better idea of the radius of neutrons stars (current guesses are 5-20km, so pretty rough). This would give us a much better idea of the physics that goes on inside them, which could lead to some important advances in our understanding of particle physics.

    • Photo: Steve Marsden

      Steve Marsden answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      That’s a really difficult question to answer. So many modern scientific breakthroughs are performed by large collaborations rather than individuals, it’s sometimes easy to loose sight of yourself. In the short term, there’s a couple of hints that we may be about to discover something big in the LHC, and I’d like to contribute directly to those analyses.

      In the slightly longer term, I’m not sure. I feel like I want to work on smaller experiments, but I don’t really have any specific goals.

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