• Question: What is the most exciting part of your job?

    Asked by rebeccacarey to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 17 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by aimeej, metemercan2011, missmagic, hippiebadmancoldplaycharlenesoriaadele.
    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      I work on a particle accelerator – this is generally pretty exciting! But I would say it’s at its most exciting when I actually get to work on operational shifts. We get to sit in a control room just like Homer Simpson. There’s loads of screens and loads of buttons, including the mandatory big red button! When the particle beam is all set up nicely we get some really good signals back from the beam and that is really good. If things aren’t working so well signals flash and there are alarms and beeping – that’s pretty exciting too, it reminds you how important it is to restore beam as quickly as possible!
      So yeh, working in the main control room, making protons go at 84% speed of light and affecting the beam by pressing buttons is pretty exciting!
      There’s not as many donuts as in Homer Simpsons workplace though. We tend to go more for pot noodles, especially on long shifts!

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      The most exciting part of the job comes when you’ve been working on a measurement, checked all the possible errors, checked all your calculations are correct and then out comes something people may never have seen before!

    • Photo: Peta Foster

      Peta Foster answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      The most exciting part of my job is when i realise that i am part of something that has never been down before anywhere and we few scientists (at about 2am most likely) are the first people to ever see it. 😀

    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      Although I am feeling incredibly exhausted right now, we are doing an experiment at 3:44am CET that should produce a paper: we’re getting better results than anyone else has done before and it should (SHOULD) break the world record we set last April.

      THAT is why we do it, getting to use really cool pieces of equipement to discover new things, things that no one has seen before.

      And yes, it is a universal thing that scientists do the most exciting stuff in the middle of the night! Any idea why that is Peta??

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