• Question: how long does it take to figure out a brand new experiment

    Asked by anon-314252 on 14 Mar 2022.
    • Photo: Mark Ridgill

      Mark Ridgill answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      In science there are few thigs that are really new. In my job we apply organic chemistry transformations (reactions) to make new molecules for testing. We use changes to existing experiments published in journals on different starting materials to make new molecules.

      To answer your question we can devise an experiment to try in about an hour – this might involve looking at what has been done before and modifying it for our needs. To get it to work efficiently might take a lot longer!

      Hope this helps?
      Mark

    • Photo: Stephen Doughty

      Stephen Doughty answered on 14 Mar 2022:

      I don’t do chemistry experiments in the way that you’re probably thinking of them – I use computers to model how new drugs might interact with particular proteins in our bodies at the atomic level. So my experiments are much more about preparing the structures that we use and setting up parameters that the computer uses to run calculations and perform simulations. So it can take a little while for me to prepare those (anything from 30 mins to a few hours) and then I run the calculations (which can be minutes or weeks long) and then I look at the results and work out if it worked properly or not (and if I need to re-do it!).

    • Photo: Amit Vernekar

      Amit Vernekar answered on 15 Mar 2022:

      Reading, revising, and keeping updating the current trends in science is of utmost importance. It is the reading that will help you set up a new experiment. While reading is important, understanding the fundamentals behind the experiment is also important.

    • Photo: TJ Preston

      TJ Preston answered on 15 Mar 2022:

      Here’s something that a mentor taught me when we were taking months to discover how to perform our experiment:

      It takes 6 months to figure out how to make the measurement, 1 day to actually make the measurement, and about a year to figure out what it means.

      I learned that 15 years ago, and I still use it as a general rule.

    • Photo: Ian McKinley

      Ian McKinley answered on 15 Mar 2022:

      This is a very difficult question, as the new experiments I work on are often carried out in special underground laboratories – like at this web site https://www.grimsel.com/ . After I have an idea, I need to find a team to do the work, usually from different countries. We then need to find – or build – the equipment needed. From first ideas to starting the work might take a year or two. However, the experiments can run for a very long time – maybe 10, 20 or even 50 years!

    • Photo: Jesko Koehnke

      Jesko Koehnke answered on 15 Mar 2022:

      A brand new experiment? It really depends. We have just tried to work out how to do a new experiment over the past week. From “This is the question we would like to answer” to “This is how we are going to do it” took 5 days. It can be much shorter (minutes) and a lot longer (years). It is incredibly rewarding to end the day knowing more than one did the day before.

      AND: Don’t be fooled by how you do science in school. People like to distinguish “the sciences” from “creative subjects”. Science is highly creative. We have to figure out how to answer a question that we did not even know how to ask a few weeks ago.

    • Photo: Veselina Georgieva

      Veselina Georgieva answered on 15 Mar 2022:

      Well, it takes quite a long time, you depend on your colleagues and your brain to develop something completely new. It could take from weeks to months or years.

    • Photo: Sophie Strickfuss

      Sophie Strickfuss answered on 16 Mar 2022:

      It really depends because often you are not starting from scratch, but making changes to something that has already been tried. It can also be a step-wise process, where you try something, make a change, try again and depending on the results make another change and try again…

    • Photo: Andrew Parrott

      Andrew Parrott answered on 16 Mar 2022:

      Some great answers already. As most have remarked it can be very variable, and you need some creativity to come up with the experiment. Another key difference to science at school is that we often don’t know what the outcome of the experiment is going to be (most of your school experiments are probably to demonstrate an already known and accepted theory) – this is the really exciting part of science. Even if the experiment fail or gives us an unexpected answer we learn something new.

Comments