• Question: what has driven you to be a scientist? Is it from your child hood or is it just naturally been there?

    Asked by JAM to Peter, Lucy, Jack, Huma, Miranda on 17 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by shazam, bff.
    • Photo: Huma Shah

      Huma Shah answered on 17 Nov 2016:

      Hello Jam,

      We’re all scientists from a young age, we humans are naturally curious and we ask questions all the time.

      Working as a scientist you get to specialise in one sub-topic of a wider field and you get to devise experiments to try and answer questions you have about that one sub-topic. Experiment results often lead to more questions, though you will have learned from the results. You then design new experiments to answer the new questions and so on. In this way you are continually pushing the boundaries of knowledge in your sub-topic one grain of sand at a time.

      The quest to find answers to the questions in your sub-topic is what drives you, in my area that is, why do we not yet have robots that talk in human language, like robots do effortlessly in the movies? Why is human language so hard to understand yet human children can pick it up if exposed to it? Can we learn from human children and put this learning into robots to make them talk like humans?

      These are the kinds of questions that drove me to be a scientist – and SciFi movies like Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Terminator 1&2, Ex Machina, and Westworld TV show are inspirations 🙂

      Huma

    • Photo: Miranda Bane

      Miranda Bane answered on 18 Nov 2016:

      Hi JAM,
      Good question. Like Huma says, we are all born naturally inquisitive so that we can learn about the world. Some people ask less questions as they get older but i have always been interested in finding out more. I was also inspried by some good teachers and my parents. Any time you are finding out about somehting you are acting like a scientist, even if it is a different subject.
      When i was little i didnt think of myself as a scientist but as an explorer. I still think this, just now i am an explorer of science for my job!

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