Scientists enjoy a strange existance. We spend our time investigating the unknown, learning new ideas and fashioning new tools with which to unpick big knots of problems. Some of it is also spent politicking; finding out who are the movers and shakers, what research is in demand and who is pulling the strings. I'm learning all this afresh, having just moved jobs from theoretical physics to biology, and I thought it would be fun to document the experience.
The transition from physics to biology has been fascinating. It has also been bewildering. Biologists and physicists are completely different. They talk a different language and take a completely different approach to scientific discovery. Basically this comes down to the difference in subjects. The human body is a vast, unknown, highly complex machine and it's very difficult to study aspects of it in isolation. Physicists, on the other hand, have done a good job at pairing down matter to its basic building blocks and now they are struggling to refine those theories and to use the blocks to explain what they see in particle detectors. Working with the basic building blocks allows the physicists a level of rigour and certainty in their thinking of which biologists can only dream.
There's been a recent realisation in biology that there's a lot to be gained by introducing some of this rigour, so there's been a push to bring computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists into biology. This has lead to the advent of fields such as computational biology, mathematical biology and systems biology and it's there that I now earn my bread and butter.
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