• Question: How do you come up with experiments to do and how to do them?

    Asked by Abi to Sajid, Katherine, Jayne, Duncan, anuantony on 8 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by selina-#potatoes.
    • Photo: Duncan McNicholl

      Duncan McNicholl answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Mostly by taking two different ideas, and seeing if they work together. Science is all about making connections between different things, and you’d be amazed at how many problems you can solve that way. Once you’ve decided what you want to try, you have to think of a way to make sure that the results that you see are because of what you’re testing and not anything else, and that can be the harder part of designing an experiment.

    • Photo: Sajid Javed

      Sajid Javed answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Scientist design and do experiments to test a theory and depending on what that is they decides on how to do them. for example, if i wanted to see if a drug was effective against a bacteria i would have to grow the bacteria, test a lot of different amount of the drug and then analyse the results. with in the experiment i would have control reactions/conditions to show that the drug is killing the bacteria. once the experiments has been completed i would repeat it to make sure it wasn’t a fluke or a mistake.

    • Photo: Katherine Byrne

      Katherine Byrne answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I talk to the people who run things in the Home Office to try to find out what they want to improve, then think about how modelling and maths can help them understand what changes would work best

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