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Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Aimee Hopper answered on 23 Jun 2014:
The greatest thing any scientist could do would be to drastically increase our knowledge of the universe around us. For instance, my goal is to create particle accelerator which are small enough to be put in every hospital in the world, ensuring that they can all make their own drugs, cheaply, on demand and that they can treat problems like cancer without the patient waiting for months and months.
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Greig Cowan answered on 23 Jun 2014:
Hi aarid. It depends. One of the greatest achievements is to get the recognition from yours peers and be awarded the Nobel prize in physics. This is the prize that was awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert last year for their role in the prediction of the Higgs boson that was discovered in the high energy particle collisions at the CERN laboratory.
However, winning the Nobel prize is very unlikely for most scientists, so I think most of us would be very happy to know that we are doing experiments and writing papers that are pushing back the boundaries of knowledge (and hopefully leading to the next big breakthrough!).
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Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 23 Jun 2014:
Interesting question aarid. To be honest I never really thought about it…
If you are thinking about recognition or award, then my field, which is theoretical physics, it’s highly improbable to be awarded the Nobel prize. The Nobel prize is always awarded to a confirmed discovery, so most often they go to the experimentalists who proved the theories (well, there are very few exceptions, like the Nobel prize for the Higgs boson went to Higgs). In theoretical physics one of the highest recognitions are the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (some people also call it the Milner prize) (that one comes with a nice 3 million dollars, twice as much as a Nobel prize 😉 ), the Kavli prize, and there is also the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, which is a very high recognition. There is a number of other prizes, but I don’t know them all!
The reason why I said I’ve never really thought about it is that, like most scientists, I’m not doing it for the rewards or the recognitions, or the money! I’m just doing science because every day when I wake up in the morning I think about how deeply interesting science is, how lucky I am to be able to do this all day long, and how much I want to solve and understand to solution to the questions I am asking about the origin of the Universe. For me, personally, that is a much bigger achievement than all the money and prizes in the world!
But really, according to me, ‘It’s About the Journey, not the Destination’…
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Dave Jones answered on 24 Jun 2014:
Nobel prizes are always possible, no matter what field you work in. But, that is never the motivation. We’re all just interested in advancing our understanding of some aspect of the universe, however tiny that advance might be!
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