• Question: how do you think of new ideas for science? Because they might already been discovered

    Asked by Izzy to Sha, Olivia, Marco, Amanda, Alex on 6 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Olivia Bailey

      Olivia Bailey answered on 6 Mar 2017:

      Good question! When a scientist thinks of or discovers something new they can write a mini-book about it (we call this ‘a paper’). This paper is then sent to lots of clever people who confirm if it is a good/new idea. If it is, the paper gets published for all the other scientists in the world to see. This is why scientists tend to read a lot – it’s important to check that no-one else has done what you’re doing before you. 🙂

      Sometimes, many scientists around the world work on similar things so they could discover something new at the same time – when this happens, there can be a race between scientists to get their paper published first (before the others) and then it is officially YOUR idea.

    • Photo: Alex Evans

      Alex Evans answered on 7 Mar 2017:

      When scientists make discoveries, they write about it in scientific reports that get published.

      Thanks to the internet, you can look through these reports online to see what is known about a certain topic, and you can see if your idea has already been done or if it really is a new one!

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