• Question: have you ever dida experment and it went wrong

    Asked by 16g452mh to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Funny story – most of the proper experiments for any research that I’ve done that went wrong (if you consider getting results you expected right). They’ve given me totally random results, or a null result (which is still a result). So yeah, science does unexpected things.

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      All the time! Yesterday my experiment went completely wrong so I have to do it again today. I was too busy thinking about answering all your questions to concentrate and I forgot to add one of the chemicals I needed to!

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      When I was 11 I visited secondary school and they gave us a chemistry experiment where if you were careful enough you could make a rainbow in a test tube. If you weren’t careful the reaction went too fast and overflowed the test tube. I thought I was so careful, but mine still overflowed. I was very sad. 🙁

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Yes, at the end of my PhD I build one instrument, carefully put it in the telescope, checked it was working during the day, opened the telescope at night, pointed it at a star and….I got results I couldn’t explain! So I had to write in my PhD thesis that this is what I got and these are my best explanations, but really, I don’t have a clue what went wrong.

      It was more important that I tried to explain it, than just saying “well, it doesn’t work and I don’t know why”.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      I think all scientists make mistakes now and again. You always learn more from when you get something wrong than when it all goes right, because you learn not to make the same mistake again!

      I’ve made lots of little mistakes when I’ve been doing my research, whether it is programming a computer program wrong, or forgetting about my very smelly experiment and leaving it to smell in the lab for a few weeks…. Oops!

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