Question: what is the best part about being a scientist

Justin Perry answered on 24 Sep 2022:

I think the best part of being a scientist is being able to find things out.

You can see something that looks interesting and perhaps not fully understood, and then you can think about the problem, design some experiments to look into it and then find an answer.

I’d like to say all my ideas and experiments work, but that’s not true. However even when things don’t work (and they may not work many times and for what seems forever!) you will discover something.

An example of this was when we were trying to come up with a new set of more sustainable chemicals to make a component for house paint (the component that lets it set on the wall but not in the tin!). We thought we had the recipe (technically called “the synthesis”) sorted out but when we ran the experiment we’d done on a small scale in a lab on a much bigger scale in a factory, the reaction didn’t work as well. It turned out there was a small proportion of a side product created by our reagents which was difficult to see at the small scale but very obvious when done at a large one. As a result we had to sit down, work out what was going wrong (some unexpected chemical reactions) and create some new additives to the reaction to rectify this and remove the side product. So that was a disappointment followed by some hard thinking and hard work… and then a happy ending.