Which science field would actually keep you up at night?
Match your obsession, not your degree.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
The field you studied and the field you'd read about at two in the morning are frequently different, and nobody ever asks about the second one. This works from the questions that snag you rather than from any qualification, and names the specific corners of science built around them.
How it works
The quiz has 3 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
Three unresolvable questions
Deep Time Question
Origins and scale: you want to know how any of this got here and how long ago it happened.
Billions of years, physical traces in rock and ice and light, a meteorite or a trilobite in your hand, and an argument at dinner about how life started. What you'd find hardest is never knowing how it began, and what draws you is the word origin. Where to go: cosmology and palaeontology are the two ends of the same question, and geology sits between them. The reading that would keep you up: Nick Lane's The Vital Question on why life started where it did, Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, Richard Fortey's Life, and anything on the James Webb telescope's early universe results. Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature if you want the history of the idea. Where it gets uncomfortable: the record is incomplete and always will be, which you already named as your frustration. The pleasure of this field is reconstruction from fragments rather than resolution, and people who need the story finished tend to bounce off it. If you can sit with that, no other field gives you anything like the same scale.
Mind Question
You want to know what's happening in there, and whether anyone else experiences things the way you do.
Milliseconds, experiments on people, an argument about free will, and a wish to witness a thought forming. Unsettled is the appeal rather than the problem, and what you'd find hardest is consciousness having no explanation at all. Where to go: neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind, which are three different disciplines circling the same thing. Read Anil Seth's Being You, Daniel Kahneman on decision making, Oliver Sacks for the clinical cases that made this field vivid, and Patricia Churchland if you want the harder materialist position. Thomas Nagel's essay on what it is like to be a bat is four pages and still the clearest statement of the problem. A caution worth having: this is the field where popular writing most often outruns the evidence, particularly brain imaging claims and anything promising to locate a feeling in a region. The hard question of why physical processes produce experience at all remains open, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The Living Systems Question
Emergence and interdependence: you want to know how a whole system holds together and how close it is to not.
Decades and centuries, long-term observation, a soil sample, and a frustration that everything is connected to everything. You'd witness a forest over a thousand years. What you'd find hardest is the system being unsavable. Where to go: ecology, climate science, and complexity science. Read Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, Rachel Carson still, Peter Wohlleben with a critical eye, anything by Elinor Ostrom on how communities manage shared resources, and Geoffrey West's Scale for the mathematics underneath. For climate specifically, the IPCC summaries for policymakers are more readable than their reputation. What makes this field hard is emotional rather than technical. Sustained attention to systems under stress is wearing, and people in this area report it. Pair the reading with something restorative and with the recovery stories, which are real and underreported. Long-term field survey work is the most satisfying version if you ever get the chance.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It tests recall of the specific questions asked, in one sitting. It is not a measure of intelligence or of how much you know about the wider subject.
- Question selection reflects editorial choices. A different set of questions on the same topic could place you differently.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.