• Question: What's the most interesting and surprising thing you have discovered?

    Asked by lizzie306 to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 19 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by chocfudge777.
    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Well, recently I looked at the data for the first six months of the “Boris Bike” scheme – where people borrow bikes and return them to stands around London. Over the first few months, people’s journeys got faster. People I work with said it was because they were getting better at finding the best route, but I like to think it was because they were getting fitter! That’s just a little result, but it made me smile…

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      I discovered that if you use a particular method for moving atoms (atoms are actually really hard to move without disturbing them), if the atom is rotating one way at the start, it might be rotating the other way at the end. In fact, it might be in a superposition of rotating both ways at once!

      This was a completely unexpected result for us. When we figured out the maths, it was very understandable what’s going on, but we were really surprised when we first saw it.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      Well I’m sad to say I’ve not done anything special. I did however see some funny stuff with one of my pieces of equipment. I use something called a mass spectrometer to trap ionised molecules in a specific place and then expose them to X-rays. After exposure we release the ions and then check their masses. i noticed that with some samples the mass tended to change shot by shot with X-rays. This is due to an effect called photoionisation. The samples were being fragmented by the X-rays and this could be seen as different masses.

Comments