• Question: Have you invented something yet?

    Asked by daws520scut on 4 Oct 2024. This question was also asked by navy520know.
    • Photo: Michael Schubert

      Michael Schubert answered on 4 Oct 2024:

      I don’t really do a lot of inventing in my job, unless you count inventing quasi-scientific explanations for fictional things (like starships or superheroes). What I do is more like “discovering” and maybe “tweaking.”

      (When I was young, I invented a pumpkin scraper, which was a kind of sharpened spoon with some teeth on one edge. Unfortunately, once I grew up, I discovered that someone else had already invented the same thing!)

    • Photo: Ryan Durnall

      Ryan Durnall answered on 22 Oct 2024:

      Sometimes it’s not just about inventing new things, but we can invent new or improve existing processes. Maybe an easier way to do something that we’ve been doing another way for a long time. Continuous Improvement is really important in engineering. We are constantly asking ‘How can we do this more efficiently or safely?’. An important thing to remember is that just because something has been done a certain way for a long time, it doesn’t mean it’s the best, safest, or fastest way to do it. People come up with new ideas all the time and that’s how we improve our processes, and therefore our final product.

    • Photo: Sophie P

      Sophie P answered on 13 Nov 2024:

      I don’t think I’ve invented anything completely new, but I do a lot of work on trying to make existing ideas/technologies/materials better. Science is a team effort, and so lots of people can get involved to improve that first invention!

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