- #1
SHISHKABOB
- 541
- 1
Hi, I hope this is the right place to ask this question. I am putting it here because it has a bit of influence regarding my education.
Sometimes when I listen to people talk about research, or people talking about how long it took someone to figure something out, I get a little bit surprised by how long they take.
Like I think when we talked about Max Planck and the blackbody stuff he figured out, it took him some ten years or so to finally figure it out, and he didn't even have the constants 100%. I just listened to a professor give a seminar on his research, and he has been working on figuring out some Carbon Oxygen nuclear fusion rate for seven whole years!
I am simply curious about the finer details regarding why it takes so long for scientific progress to happen sometimes. Do the experiments simply take a reeaaally long time to happen? Do they have to put a lot of data into a computer that must take some long time to analyze it all?
I am not assuming these guys are lazy or anything, I know that it is all complicated and tough, and I am just wondering about what exactly a modern scientist does all the time.
When I am sitting in lab trying to figure out what the heck the experiment is supposed to be like, sometimes I just sit there scratching my head for a good half hour, is there a lot of head scratching in physics too? I have no doubts that I'd be scratching my head for much longer than half an hour if there was no TA there to give me hints.
Essentially I am curious about what I will be doing as a researcher in the field of physics besides eating and sleeping.
Sometimes when I listen to people talk about research, or people talking about how long it took someone to figure something out, I get a little bit surprised by how long they take.
Like I think when we talked about Max Planck and the blackbody stuff he figured out, it took him some ten years or so to finally figure it out, and he didn't even have the constants 100%. I just listened to a professor give a seminar on his research, and he has been working on figuring out some Carbon Oxygen nuclear fusion rate for seven whole years!
I am simply curious about the finer details regarding why it takes so long for scientific progress to happen sometimes. Do the experiments simply take a reeaaally long time to happen? Do they have to put a lot of data into a computer that must take some long time to analyze it all?
I am not assuming these guys are lazy or anything, I know that it is all complicated and tough, and I am just wondering about what exactly a modern scientist does all the time.
When I am sitting in lab trying to figure out what the heck the experiment is supposed to be like, sometimes I just sit there scratching my head for a good half hour, is there a lot of head scratching in physics too? I have no doubts that I'd be scratching my head for much longer than half an hour if there was no TA there to give me hints.
Essentially I am curious about what I will be doing as a researcher in the field of physics besides eating and sleeping.