Question: if you could test anything, what would it be?
Keywords: experiment, test
Comments
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Anything? I’d come up with an experiment to test out in space that only I could do so I can get a ride onto the International Space Station. No idea what though.
*thinks*
I know! I would love to test explosions in space and compare the characteristics out there to how things explode on Earth. How’s that for genius thinking? Going into space to blow stuff up.
Oh wow. Sensational question there siennarox123.
The thing I would like to test is being looked at right now by other people. It’s rather complicated and is in an area called quantum mechanics. The background is nicely described in Stephen Hawking’s latest book, the Grand Design. The theory is something called “M-theory”.
It’s to do with atoms (and small things like that) being quite vague until you look at them and they then decide what they are. Atoms can actually be in lots of different places when you’re not looking, but when you measure them they have to commit to being in a certain place only.
When you study physics, you’ll come across an experiment called Young’s Slits. It’s completely mind-bending. I learned about it when I was 17. There was actually something else very cool about it that I didn’t realise back then, and which I think a lot of other people didn’t realise, until quite recently. People are now looking at it. I want to know what happens there. Sorry, but I can’t describe it here – there’s not enough space. Anyway, it’s about the nature of reality and time and it’s just amazing. It’s all about showing that when you look at an atom, it changes not only what it is, but also what it WAS, in the past. So observing something now changes the HISTORY of a thing. That’s socks-off amazing and I love it.
In chemistry, in my work, the thing I really want to test is what we’re going to do next. We want to find a cure for a disease – malaria. Lots of drug companies are working around the world on this. I want to open up the problem to anyone and work on the web, so anyone can take part. I want to share everything. The question I’m asking is: does that make the discovery faster? I think it will. A lot of people don’t agree with me. So I want to test that.
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What I would like to find out is the biggest insect/animal you can freeze that will come back to life when you thaw it out again.
That might sound mean, and I can’t test it because it would be too cruel to throw different things into liquid nitrogen at -170 degrees then see which ones come out alive. It would be interesting though and it might teach us how to freeze humans (without them dying). Then we could put them into a spaceship and send them to another galaxy that takes longer than the normal human life to get to, like you see in the movies.
In the Lab we keep bacteria in the freezer at -80 degrees celsius. When you unfreeze them they are still alive and you can use them to do your experiments. Bacteria are easy to freeze because they are very tiny and they are only a single cell. An animal, made up of millions of cells, is much larger and more complex. Because it is bigger it would take longer to freeze right through. This is a problem because if the whole animal doesn’t freeze all at once, then some of the cells might die because you’ve stopped blood flow.
The other problem is that freezing things makes them bigger. If you fill a plastic bottle right up with water and put it in the freezer, the lid will pop off as the water freezes and expands, creating ice. Our cells have a lot of water in them which would expand as it froze. This might cause the cells to burst, and that would cause us to die.
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