Question: What has been the most complicated graph you have come across or drawn? what was the experiment of this graph? and were the results interesting and suprising?

Grant Campbell answered on 13 Mar 2013:

Gosh, good question! (I’m glad various people are being inspired by graphs – I’ve had quite a few questions on this theme.)

I just saw the most complicated diagram (a bit like a graph) I have seen in a colleague’s office the other day. It was about 8 feet tall and showed the entire scientific programme that would need to be undertaken over a 100 year period in order for humans to reach the stage that we could colonise another planet! It was a reminder of how complicated such an endeavour is and how much scientific research and development, along with engineering, would be needed. Perhaps the unsurprising thing is that we have not yet progressed very far on that diagram – there’s still an enormous amount that would need to be done.

That being said, an even more complicate diagram is needed to describe all the biochemical reactions going on in a single cell. That makes you appreciate (a) how complex life is; and (b) how much clever science has gone into working out all that complexity – and there’s still lots that we don’t know.

My own graphs tend to be relatively simple by comparison, and usually compare a line resulting from a mathematical model with some points that show the experimental data. One of the most complex was showing how the density of dough changes when you change the pressure during mixing. The mathematical model to describe this is actually pretty complicated, but I was extremely happy to see how well it agreed with the experimental data, and with the fact that it allowed us to calculate, for the first time, how quickly air is mixed into dough during mixing. This helped explain one of the difficulties of creating really good quality bread (the difficult is that it’s hard to get enough oxygen into the dough during mixing) and pointed towards practical ways of improving this. I have a poster showing these results just outside my door, because they are some of the results I am most proud of and most enjoy looking at.