Question: if you werent studying what you are now, what other science topics would you be interested in?

  1. I’m really interested in food production and ways of making it more efficient so that less energy and water is required to make the same amount of food. I think this is an area which is really important now in poorer countries, and will become more important all around the world as our population keeps growing and the environment misbehaves (floods, droughts, earthquakes and cyclones are all very bad for crops).

    I’m also interested in genetic modification of plants to make them produce more crops or resist infections. Genetic modification is something that a lot of people are opposed to, but I think it might become necessary and I would like to find out more about it.

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  2. Black holes. Teleportation. Synthetic biology.

    The second one of those – teleportation. I should really say “entanglement”. Turns out that atoms and smaller things behave very oddly. If one atom splits and becomes two smaller things, and those things move apart from each other, they are still somehow “connected”. You can do a measurement on one of them, and the other one “instantly” responds to that. As if they are literally connected. If you want to read about one mind-bending example, look up the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.

    So it’s an area of quantum mechanics that is all about doing stuff at point A and that apparently affecting point B (miles away) immediately. People think that if we can understand this we can teleport things. I think that’s pretty optimistic, but it’s all just so amazingly cool that I’d love to work in that area. You need maths, though. And after you’ve studied maths, you need to go and do MORE MATHS.

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Comments

  1. I would probably head towards fulminology, the study of lightning or perhaps move into oenology, the study of wine. I like both of them though not together though.

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