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Asked by lidivampire to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 18 Jun 2011.
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Suzi Gage answered on 14 Jun 2011:
Hi @lidivampire
This is a good question. I hope that the work I do will be around in the future to help people. You can never be sure whether your research will be a breakthrough and be remembered, or it will be one of a group of studies showing a similar thing, so may be mentioned in passing, or it will be one result in a sea of results showing the opposite thing, in which case it was probably a mistake.That is related to how we know that what we find out is true. Scientists are often careful not to say anything is ‘true’, we tend to say ‘there is evidence for’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘this is what we think, and this is what our experiment has shown’.
In order to get more certainty in our results, it is best to try and repeat your experiment a number of times. If you get the same result each time, this is more proof that what you’ve found is correct, rather than being a fluke. You can also try and answer the same question using a different method, if both methods produce the same result this suggests it is correct.I hope this answers your question, I can go in to more detail if you’d like 🙂
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Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:
In linguistics, it’s the same as what Suzi said! It’s also worth thinking about it this way: that very few scientists make such big discoveries that their own personal work is remembered after they have gone. The ones who do, are the ones who get Nobel Prizes! Much more often, we each add our little contribution to the sum of knowledge in our field, and then the people who come afterwards build on that.
On the other hand, most university scientists’ jobs have some teaching in them, and you might be remembered in future for that. I know that I can remember the teaching of some of my good teachers at school and university. They probably didn’t know it would be memorable, but it has stayed with me. So maybe I will help in future after all!
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