• Question: What is your favourite moment in science?

    Asked by fergus to Asif, Laura, Lena, Sean, Viv on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by alex16, bfill, welshboy.
    • Photo: Laura Waters

      Laura Waters answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I like the idea that Darwin was brave enough to consider evolution even though it went against the religous ideas of the time. Anyone who stands up for what they believe in gets my vote.

    • Photo: Sean Murphy

      Sean Murphy answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      My favorite moment is the first time a new discovery or idea is used to improve a patients life. Most research takes many many years to develop into a treatment that can be used for patients. So the moment when all the hard work pays off to help someone is very special.

    • Photo: Viv Lyons

      Viv Lyons answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      There have been a few occasions in physics where everybody thought the world worked in one particular way that somebody had the guts to buck the trend, even though their lives might have been in danger. In the middle ages all Catholics believed that the sun revolved around the Earth but the Polish astronomer Copernicus used observations to show that actually we went around the sun. He was so much in danger of his life that he did not publish this work whilst he was still alive.
      A couple of hundred years later Newton worked out about gravity and although the story of him sitting under an apple tree is probably a myth this was a huge leap in our way of thinking.

    • Photo: Lena Ciric

      Lena Ciric answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      For me, the best moment is science was the discovery of the structure of DNA. We already knew that characteristics were passes down through generations but we just didn’t know how. The unlocking of the DNA code showed a simple yet sophisticated mechanism. That’s the beauty of it. And it has really revolutionised the life sciences. I’m getting emotional… 😉

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