Question: Would you say you are like Sherlock Holmes?

Sue Carney answered on 13 Jun 2011:

In some ways yes. I enjoy the challenge of solving a new mystery and like Sherlock Holmes, I have to be very logical in my thinking and use scientific experiments to find answers to questions that might help solve a case.

Sherlock Holmes used his powers of deduction to solve mysteries. Using deductive reasoning meant that he used logic to eliminate explanations that did not fit until he found one logical explanation to fit the circumstances. Using this method he was able to tell all sorts of things about someone just from their appearance and a little bit of knowledge about them.

Forensic scientists use similar logical thinking, but the answers are rarely as clear cut as Sherlock’s. We consider the value of a piece of evidence (or the result of an experiment) in terms of how much (or how little) it might support a particular scenario. In other words, how strongly does our evidence support the view that the accused person committed the crime rather than a specified alternative version of events? We call this type of logic inductive thinking.

In other ways, I’m not like Sherlock Holmes at all. I don’t smoke a pipe, play the violin, wear a deerstalker hat or run around London in disguise trying to catch criminals!