Research in the School of Science & Computing

These pages are designed to give a bit of insight as to what it is that Curtin researchers do when they're not teaching students. They are written in what is hopefully plain English, but if there’s anything you don’t understand, please feel free to contact us on scienceoutreach@curtin.edu.au with further questions.

Not all the pages conclude satisfactorily. The projects they describe are ongoing research, not things that have necessarily been discovered already. There is therefore a certain element of conjecture and theory, rather than absolute truth. Indeed, in science there is no such thing as absolute truth: a fact is true only for as long as it takes to disprove it. Certainly, there are some things that are likely never to be disproved – they’ve been testing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for nearly a century now and he’s always come out on top – but the possibility still exists that those seemingly-irrefutable facts will one day be overturned, however small that possibility may seem.

Australians - particularly West Australians - are in a good position to understand this. For centuries, Europeans assumed that all swans were white; it was an irrefutable truth. Then they came here, and got a bit of a shock!

That’s what research is all about: chipping away at accepted truth to see if you can build on it in some way. That, and making chemicals and machinery do extremely cool things in very cool ways. There’s not really much difference between researchers and old men who spend all day tinkering in their shed: They all just love making things, getting stuff done.

Disclaimer
The information herein was obtained during conversations with researchers and on consultation with accepted reference books. It has been checked by the researchers in question but it is still possible that errors have crept in for which the author takes full responsibility. Do not use the information here for homework projects, or for designing unsupervised science experiments. Sections such as the ’Analysis’ pages describe techniques commonly used by researchers, rather than techniques that they are necessarily doing research into improving.