Scientists are often viewed as cold, insipid people. Platonic robots who appear overly connected with data and inhumanly disconnected from emotions.

This is perversely inaccurate.

To be clear: Academic scientists are freelance-researchers who literally investigate the unknown. They operate with limited resources, minimal job security, finite time, poor pay (relative to their qualifications) and maximum uncertainty. They spend huge periods of time doing work that may not produce anything useful and should a technical error occur during an experiment, weeks of (expensive) hard work may have to be scrapped. To top it off, their success is judged by where (not if) they publish — something that is highly dependent on contemporary fashion, the recent performance of rivals and as a result, has a questionable association with ‘talent’.

Such an environment ensures scientists are very emotional people.

To address this psychological misconception, The Guardian has published several first-person reports describing the emotional experiences of scientists. They’re all interesting pieces, although I’m not convinced any truly capture the core driver of scientific emotion: Uncertainty. No profession provides unequivocal certainty — but as the purpose of science is to investigate the unknown, it always operates in uncertainty. When coupled with transient job stability, unpredictable results and an extremely competitive applicant:position employment ratio it’s surprising anyone would want to do it.

For all these lows, however, scientists can achieve comparable highs. One benefit of investigating the unknown is that scientists are assured a front row seat at the frontier of human discovery. Scientists see things before anyone else in human history — and when things work, they can, sincerely, change the world. Whilst uncertainty brings professional instability, when things work, there is really no feeling like it. For every Sheldon Cooper, there's a Doc Brown.

You can't say that about many nine-till-fives.