Question: Do you ever find it boring???

Hussain Jaffery answered on 17 Nov 2015:

To be honest, the some experiments do have an element of repetition, and though it may appear ‘boring’ at first, this is exactly where care needs to be taken to do things just precisely.

In fact, I think boredom is a good thing to have in science – it gives birth to new ideas and better ways of doing things. Let me explain: If you do an experiment where you feel bored because you have an hour of eating time or the equipment you use is slow: you will have a desire to do two things – fill that hour of waiting with some other task that you were ignoring and putting off or you could get to work in making your experiment run faster and more efficient, so you wouldn’t have to wait any longer.

It’s almost impossible to to be bored for me, because there are all of these questions and experiments at the bak of my head that need thinking about and doing.

Humans evolved boredom as a way of spending their time on important stuff like finding food, shelter and ways of surviving. In modern times, we can use boredom to our advantage by applying ourselves to fixing and thinking about real problems, like those of science and technology and of our place in the world.