Question: do u really think ur project will succed?

Sam Geen answered on 14 Jun 2013:

Man, someone is pessimistic!

Well, yes and no. Science isn’t about concrete success – it’s not like you work for 6 months and *bing!* you’ve discovered something new. There are always setbacks, always things you didn’t think you’d find or problems you didn’t think about. It’s a million miles from school experiments (literally, if you use a telescope in space to do your work), where you know what’s going to happen and you have very clear instructions to make it happen. Science is all about doing the wrong thing until you do the right thing through a combination of clever ideas (“what if I try this…?”) and dumb luck (“wait, what is *that* thing doing?”). So predicting whether a project will do what you expect is impossible, and in fact if you know exactly what’s going to happen it’s probably not science in the first place!

My project right now – setting off a supernova and seeing what it does to the gas in the galaxy around it – is a small part of the bigger picture. A galaxy has thousands of supernovae going off in it over its lifetime, and we need to understand what all these do. Then you have all the gas swirling around in the galaxy, clouds of dust and cold gas, magnetic fields, x-rays and UV radiation. All of this is really complicated and people have been looking at it for decades, slowly discovering something new each time and trying to understand how it all works together. I don’t expect to solve everything immediately, but I do hope to discover something new that will help us solve it eventually.