• Question: What is the most interesting experiment you have ever done?

    Asked by Sydney to Joe, Jos, Kate, Lisa, Pierre on 7 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by 362tema33, Niamh H.
    • Photo: Lisa Simmons

      Lisa Simmons answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      I remember when I first went out to a synchrotron, I was amazed by the size of the facility (you can hop on a bike to get from one part to another). I went there armed with lots of different teeth samples in my bag. Whilst we were doing the experiment we found that the crystals in enamel are all arranged differently in different types of teeth, and that there were more in some than others. At the time, I can remember thinking how amazing it was that no body ever knew that and we had found it in just a few days. I’ve done lots of interesting experiments, but that is the one that sticks with me the most, because it was my first time out at the synchrotron.

    • Photo: Joshaniel Cooper

      Joshaniel Cooper answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      During my undergraduate degree we had the chance to do a long investigation (several months). Me and a friend looked at how hot water can freeze faster than cold water. We spent a long time measuring water freezing (over and over again) at different temperatures. This wasn’t so interesting, but when we had the results we worked out how it can happen and it was great.
      We started with a strange effect (hot water freezing faster than cold water), did some experiments and then worked out how it would happen in a way that nobody had done before!

    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 8 Nov 2014:

      Like Lisa, I think my I think the most interesting experiment I have done was at a scnchrotron. We used the Swiss Light Source synchrotron to run an experiment best last November, in which I made a mini magma chamber and then captured a 3D video while we squeezed the magma. We were trying to understand how magma moves, and what conditions we need to have before it will begin to flow. This was the first time anyone had every tried this kind of experiment, and we are still analysing the data and working on our results over a year later…. but we sure got it flowing!

Comments