• Question: What makes you different from the other contestants?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Wow! Really tough question!
      In general, I’d say we’re pretty similar. We’re all just really interested in the World around us and trying to understand some small part of it. The bit that makes us different is which part exactly we’re trying to understand and maybe how we go about it.

      I, for example, am trying to understand how stars behave. To do that, I use telescopes to observe them and then try to figure out what that means. The other contestants here are interested in other things, from the birth of the Universe through to what the tiniest sub-atomic particles in the Universe do. That means that they might need to build their own experiments, where as I can only work with the stars I can see (I can’t arrange the stars differently to see how they behave!). They might have to use big computer simulations to try and understand or predict what is happening (I sometimes have to do that too, but I bet I do it less that some of the others!).

      So, fundamentally, I’d say that we’re pretty similar. We’re all just really interested in stuff! The thing that makes us different is the particular stuff that we’re interested in!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      Different? Not entirely sure really. I’m an experimental physicist, so like doing experiments to determine things.
      At the moment I’m also doing a lot of computer simulations on the device that I’m making to see what will happen if I put it into a high energy electron beam. That may make me different 🙂

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      Very good question, josiek01! What makes two human beings different from each other?
      Well, first, there is the DNA. Incredibly small differences in our genetics makes us all look like very different people, with different hight, different eyes, hair, and skin colour, different facial features, and even, to some (limited) extend, different personalities.

      Education and cultural backgrounds are also very important factors. The way we were brought up by our parents and the society in which we grew up often sets things as different as the types of values we believe in and things we find most important in life, to things we like to eat! I really like to eat chocolate and cheese – but not together, of course!! – but my Chinese roommate finds those things absolutely disgusting, because she wasn’t raised eating them!! Similarly, there are things that she absolutely love that I would have a hard time eating :D. For example, I can manage to eat bugs (and I did in the past), but I’d wouldn’t say that I’d prefer a bowl of grasshoppers over a good hamburger!

      But DNA culture and parental education are not all, far from it! Just look at identical twins! They share the exact same DNA at the beginning of their lives (in that sense they really are two clones!!), the same parents that raised them at the same time, the same culture, but then they develop very different tastes, different preferences, and even different personality traits! That because they have different life experiences, they went through different things and learnt different lessons from them, and they grew up to be different! Some scientists even think that life experiences can actually modify our genes and DNA!

      So it’s really the sum of everything that we have done and thought about and felt and reflected upon and learnt and decided in our lives, as well as our DNA, that makes the unique person that we each are today, and, somehow, everyday we become a bit of a different person!

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