• Question: If you could achieve one thing in your lifetime, what would it be and how would you aim to achieve this?

    Asked by isabelkwilkinson to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 12 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Find alien life! And to achieve it, I’d put together a team of scientists and engineers from all over the world to build a huge telescope to study planets around other stars that are the same size as Earth and that get the same energy Earth gets from the Sun. Then, I’d release our data to the public so you and everyone else could help us analyze it.

    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      That’s a great question and its completely stumped me! I guess every scientist wants to win the Nobel Prize, but obviously most don’t. What for I don’t know! I guess other than discovering something amazing that I can’t even conceive of right now, I’d love to know that I’d inspired new generations of Physicists and made science a little more palatable to the general public. That would be a really nice feeling, and I’m certainly working on it.

    • Photo: Usman Kayani

      Usman Kayani answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I would love to answer age old questions on the nature of time and space; and perhaps once we’ve fully understood what time actually is; it wouldn’t be so hard to travel in time. That would be a dream of mine to travel in time but I don’t think practically it will be done within my lifetime, so on what I could achieve perhaps it is some unification of time between our current best theories of nature which are currently contradictory. One says time is continuous, it exists and it always has and the other says time is granular like sand.

      The way I would achieve this is in my head! That’s the great thing about being a theoretical physicist like Einstein, I just have to think and I can create a universe in my mind. It would be using some very clever but complex mathematics along with results from other physicists including experimental data that could guide me through the process.

    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      All my life, I have wanted to work full-time for a space agency (like NASA or ESA). The human side of space travel is where my original interest lies, and so that’s what I’m aiming for – to get involved in that in any way I can. It would be awesome to be able to fly up into space and look back down on the Earth, there can’t possibly be a greater feeling than that. And who knows, with all this new ‘space tourism’ emerging, maybe I’ll get to do that one day!

    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I’d like to find another planet like Earth, so something that might have alien life. I’m already working on part of this problem so it’s not unrealistic, as long as you realise that most of these great things aren’t actually done by one person, but a team of people working together. Right now I’m figuring out how big the asteroid belts are around other stars, which is super important for when we build an instrument that can go look for these other Earths since the dust from the asteroids can get in the way and make it hard to see the planets.
      g

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