• Question: What is the most exciting discovery you made during your research?

    Asked by anon-258171 on 2 Jul 2020.
    • Photo: Anar Yusifov

      Anar Yusifov answered on 2 Jul 2020:

      Level of excitement was the same every time. I guess I’m still looking for my “moment of truth”.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 2 Jul 2020:

      I used to work as a geophysicist, in oil and mineral exploration, which I guess counts as a kind of applied research. The most exciting – and satisfying – discovery in that job was, ironically, a negative one. I worked on a copper ore body which was inside a mountain in the United Arab Emirates. My job was to determine its size, to see whether it was worth mining out. We put a large electric current directly into it, where it was exposed, and took voltage readings on the mountainside above it. That sounds easy but it was physically quite demanding and took several weeks to complete. It was exciting to see the picture build slowly every day. In the end, we were able to define pretty precisely what area it covered, and from intelligent guesswork about its depth we worked out that it wasn’t economic to mine – it would have cost more to dig up and process than the copper content was worth. So, a negative result, but very satisfying as I could actually touch the stuff we were exploring for and got a very precise measure of what was there. Often in exploration we were looking at things far below the surface and rarely got such clear “ground truth” as to what was actually there.

    • Photo: Chloe Martindale

      Chloe Martindale answered on 2 Jul 2020:

      My most exciting moment is definitely not my most important result, but it was the most surprising to me. In order to try and understand the mathematical objects I was studying, I used a computer program to draw each object as a shape (a circle, square, or triangle, sorted by type), and to draw a line between two shapes if they were related in the way I was studying. Now the picture I got at first was a big scrambled mess (it had hundreds of shapes and lines) from which it seemed impossible to read off anything useful. But then I asked the computer to pick out parts of the picture with certain characteristics that I thought might give a nicer picture. One of these pictures popped out as a beautifully symmetrical picture with lots of clear (and unexpected) mathematical meaning. That was a satisfying moment!

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