Question: What type of people work within your field, do you all have similar lives or are you vastly different?

Duncan McNicholl answered on 7 Nov 2017:

That’s a great question. I think the people who work in science, and especially physics, and extra-especially optical physics, are all a very similar kind of person, because to be interested in optics you have to have patience and a steady hand and be interested in how the things that you can see are controlled and explained by the things you can’t see. The thing is, even if we’re similar types of person, we all have very different lives, because we’re all at different ages and stages of what we do. It’s a bit like you and your teachers: you kind of have to be a different ages, otherwise no one can learn anything from anyone else, right? So I’d say we’re similar people at different stages of our lives, and that makes us vastly different.