• Question: what was the most challenging invstigation u took part in or managed and how ?

    Asked by zareblydia to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      The one I’m working on now is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m trying to understand a lot of very complex physics, most of which is still very theoretical, and apply this to a chemistry based project. I’m constantly finding myself stretched far beyond what I thought it was possible for me to understand. Which is hard, but fun at the same time.

    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      I’ve run computer simulations (like a big videogame, essentially) that use millions of hours in total (i.e. months on thousands of processors) that use tens of terabytes of data. This is demanding on computers, but it also takes a long time to analyse the data to find out what it tells us about the universe.

    • Photo: Matthew Pankhurst

      Matthew Pankhurst answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      I guess the one I’m doing at the moment is the hardest, because it’s the biggest anyone has attempted in this field. I need to figure out the individual stories of thousands of crystals and put it all together to show what many different bits of magma where doing – and when! It’s the sheer size that is the hard part now – next year the hard part will be putting it all together into a 4 dimensional puzzle (the forth dimension is time)…. wish me luck!

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