• Question: Do you not like any parts of science? e.g. physics or biology

    Asked by ellielittle to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 10 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by rsharma6, .
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I don’t like organs in the body. Human biology. It always felt unnecessarily specific, but not detailed enough to be useful when I learnt about it in school. There are some areas of physics I find hard, but nothing I really dislike. I only found bits of chemistry I didn’t like when I did a degree. The stuff I really dislike is called “cyclic voltammetry”. I’m afraid I never understood it so I can’t explain it…

    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I do avoid the bits I’m not good at, not usually because I dislike them, mostly because it takes me too long to understand them! I’ve never really looked into electrochemistry much, and if I can find a wrong order to do organic chemistry in I will (despite being a petty good cook!)
      Biology was always the area I disliked most at school, but when I was doing my degree I took modules in it both 2nd and 3rd year, so that makes it very confusing.
      Short answer probably not.

    • Photo: Nicola Rogers

      Nicola Rogers answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I find computational chemistry very difficult – so I tend to avoid this at all costs! this is where computers are used to calculate how molecules might react or behave.

    • Photo: Kieren Bradley

      Kieren Bradley answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      I usually avoid biology, cells are full of all sorts of things with complicated names and it seems you have to spend ages waiting to see whether they die to come up with your results. I’m sure it is much more clever than that, but the only interesting thing in biology I’ve found is photosynthesis which I think is amazing, that plants managed to evolve something so useful that the planet is pretty much the colour that it is based on that one process.

      One thing I quite like is cyclic voltammetry, I usually do it at least once a week. It’s all about measuring what different chemical reactions you can make happen by applying a voltage between two electrodes in a solution. For example if you took a battery and the graphite from two pencils, connect them up with the graphite in a cup of water and bicarbonate, you could get bubbles at each piece of graphite, one oxygen and the other hydrogen. Cyclic voltammetry allows you to see which other reactions also happen and how much energy is required, for example making lithium dissolve as it would in your mobile phone batteries.

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