My Plea to Scientists Everywhere. 

I am a physicist. An astrophysicist. I am interested in space, planets, moons, stars, galaxies, cosmology, SETI, etc. What's on Earth isn't as important to me as knowing what's in our universe! Palaeontologists, anthropologists and doctors, I think what you do is incredible and fascinating. But it's not for me. 

Hubble view of M83

Spending a week surrounded by biochemists, biologists, neuroscientists and medical students during my work experience at The Lancet, and a week surrounded by Robotics professors at the Royal Institution helped make me even more sure that I know exactly what area of science I want to go into. However it also showed me a different side to science. 

Science is made up of everything we see around us. The Oxford Dictionary definition of 'science' is: 'The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.' 

A Tree of Science

Basically, thinking, testing and proving your ideas of how the physical and natural world works through experiments and observations. This covers from astrophysics to pathology to geology to physiology to plant sciences to material sciences to genetics to earth sciences to zoology. These branches of science come from biology, chemistry and physics. Some jump back and forth across the boundary of physics and chemistry, like material sciences, others leap into geography, like earth sciences and geology. But all of them are encompassed under the idea that science is a study of how our world works. 

I have found that often physicists will mock biologists, saying their science is the easy one (I should know, I've done it) when it most definitely isn't. I have been to university level biochemistry lectures. It is not easy. While I haven't heard any mockery of physics (yet.) it is probably out there. It just shows one of the ways in which we have taken this huge, wonderful topic 'science' and have split it and boxed it off into little sections. 

I would like to try and help our generation understand that biology, chemistry and physics aren't separate. They're just different sides of the same die. When we understand that I believe we will be able to make more breakthroughs in science and make more progress towards solving the problems which fascinate us. We will be able to bring the strands of all of the sciences together and weave them into a huge picture of what our universe is, from the tiniest atom to the largest elephant. 

So my plea to scientists everywhere: Don't discount scientific disciplines which aren't your own. Don't raise others to mock biology or call geology boring. Don't let people dismiss theories which aren't their own unless there is solid proof to disprove said theories. It is so important for us to all acknowledge each other and each others ideas, to work together to help put together how this wonderful puzzle of a world works. 

If we don't work together I have a feeling we're going to lose one of the puzzle pieces under the sofa of ignorance and we all hate that feeling of a permanently incomplete puzzle.