Question: is it fun being a scientist and what sort of experiments have you done in the past year???

Paul Stevenson answered on 15 Mar 2010:

Yeah, it is fun. I think most scientists do their jobs because they are interested in discovering stuff, and I’m no different. They way in which I am different from many other scientists is that I’m a theoretical physicist. The theoretical bit means that I don’t do experiments, though I do calculate what might be expected in experiments. The last thing I did was to calculate whether you could make a new element (with 118 protons) by colliding two smaller nuclei together. The answer is yes – now I’m hoping someone will be able to do the experiment.