• Question: whats the coolest place you have been to during your career (to do with science)?

    Asked by Emma to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 20 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 20 Jun 2015:

      Got to be the Super-Kamiokande cavern (see the picture on my profile page).
      Awesome!
      And we are planning to build one 20 times bigger!!

    • Photo: Rob Temperton

      Rob Temperton answered on 21 Jun 2015:

      Yeah….. I can’t really compete with super-K!

      The coolest facility I have used is the Soleil synchrotron in France. I have also visited the new MaxIV synchrotron in Sweden on multiple occasions. It is still being built and it is really interesting to see these huge facilities at different phases of completeness. You get to see all the bits which you wouldn’t normally have access to!

      Rob

    • Photo: Josh Meyers

      Josh Meyers answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      I went to a conference in Strasbourg last year which was cool… But mainly because I lounged about in the sun and listened to science all day for a week!

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      For me it was definitely Japan. I loved visiting Tokyo and meeting all the scientists there. They were doing some really amazing high-tech research with really great equipment. I was able to watch how they do the research so that I could learn from them.

      Japanese people have a really great work ethic. The one thing that is most important to Japanese people is that they are self-sufficient and they take a salary home to support their family. As long as someone is earning money doing a job, the government will support them with anything that they can’t afford, like healthcare or repairs to the house. Everyone is so helpful and honest and love to share their hospitality.

      In Japan, people find face-to-face meetings really important. They often told me that they don’t speak English, but they do, they’re just being modest!! I got to meet people who have published some of the work that I read every day, or that I reference in my own work, so they are quite famous in my area – that was really cool. So networking, making contacts for the future, meeting people face-to-face, was really important.

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