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Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Natasha Stephen answered on 13 Jun 2014:
This is a difficult one to answer as all scientists works on multiple projects at once! I am currently working on things that I started during my PhD as well as 3 or 4 other projects with other scientists all over the world. The costs vary depending on the project and can be very cheap or quite expensive depending on what you would like to do; typically my lab based projects are a few thousand pounds in total but if we’re talking about another Mars rover, then that is going to cost a LOT more! Curiosity cost £1.5 million!
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Nate Bastian answered on 13 Jun 2014:
Like Natasha, I am currently working on 4 or 5 main projects, with scientists all over the world. It’s difficult to put a direct price tag on my projects, as I use publicly accessible telescopes, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the VLT in Chile. These costs hundreds of millions of pounds (or even billions) to construct and operate, but of course, they are used for thousands of different projects.
As for salaries, scientists working at universities tend to get paid much less than we would if we went into private industry. However, we (at least most of us) are more than happy to take the pay cut, as we love what we do, and are driven by a passion to learn, rather than for money.
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Roberto Trotta answered on 13 Jun 2014:
Not much at all, since all the observations I work from come from machines/telescopes that have been funded by others, so I can use them for free (which is the great thing about science!).
But the Large Hadron Collider (the machine at CERN that’s been used to discover the Higgs boson) has cost 10 billion dollars or so to build. Some of the space telescopes I use have also cost billions. But then many many scientists use those to do lots of great science, so it’s well worth the cost.
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Sarah Casewell answered on 14 Jun 2014:
My answer is similar to Roberto – I use large telescopes all over the world, but I get to use them for free! The other thing about science is that there isn’t often an end to a project – we find out all we can about a subject, only to discover more unanswered questions.
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Sam Connolly answered on 15 Jun 2014:
Like Roberto and Sarah, I use data from telescopes which are free to use, so there aren’t really any big costs directly connected to my project, just the electricity to run my computer! The telescopes I use are all either in space, so they can see X-rays, or made of a lot of huge dishes, so they can see radio waves from space. They cost millions or billions of pounds to build, but are used by hundreds of different Astronomers. They’re usually paid for by the governments of countries whose scientists need them for their work, as opposed to directly by the scientists.
Comments
joshnapier commented on :
lots!!!