Question: hi, could you tell me ,what do you like about being a scientist

Mark Lancaster answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Doing things that are challenging and which at face value seem impossible but with ingenuity, collaboration and hard work are not. Also doing something that you know no one else is doing – this might be a small thing like looking at some data from an experiment in a different way or might be a bigger thing like building a new experiment that no one has done before (or not to the same precision, intensity etc). I also enjoy being in an environment where everyone is encouraged to come up with ideas (and often the crazier the better). It is also quite a social environment – it’s not uncommon for most of my research group of 50 or so people to be all down the pub together on a Friday. I also get to travel a lot – my two experiments are in Chicago and Japan and there are quite a few workshops and conferences going on – this year so far I think I’ve done about 65,000 miles….and through physics I’ve seen many countries that I expect I wouldn’t otherwise have done and it has given me the opportunity to live aboard which makes you appreciate the good and bad of the UK – I lived in Hamburg for 4 years and Berkeley (just across the bay from San Francisco) for 4 years..