• Question: is there anything in science you find boring?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 14 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 14 Jun 2014:

      There have been areas of science I’ve thought were boring because I found them hard, but that’s not the same as the science being boring. A lot of things I thought I wasn’t interested in I’ve later had to use as part of my science so I’ve had to go back and reread about them. I tend to find that when I have an application for the knowledge, I’m much more keen to learn about it. I guess I’ve learned not to write any area of physics off as “boring” or “not relevant to me” as quite often I need to learn about them later!

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 15 Jun 2014:

      I always struggled to stay focussed while studying chemistry. I wouldn’t say that it’s boring, but I definitely found physics, biology and history to be much more interesting to me.

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 15 Jun 2014:

      I tend to be less interested in things that are nothing to do with my area of research, but that’s probably just because I don’t know much about those things. I find pretty much everything is interesting once you know quite a bit about it. I’ve always preferred physics and chemistry to biology though!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I believe that all of science can be absolutely fascinating — it’s only a question of finding the kind of science that appeals to you!

      I have many colleagues who study very different things than I. Most of them I find interesting, and some are a bit dull to me, but I think this is just because they are not my thing — it’s like somebody being absolutely passionate about football, and finding tennis boring, and the other way around. It doesn’t mean that one or the other is really more interesting — it’s a matter of personal preference.

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I personally find genetics and evolution really fascinating but I often find the way it is presented in a evolutionary sense quite boring! There is a branch of science known as taxonomy and it uses a system of classification known as cladistics to display whether or not a species evolved with a certain characteristic or not on a ‘tree’ diagram. I work in the Natural History Museum in London so a lot of my colleagues use these diagrams and I just get lost after seeing a couple!

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