• Question: have all your investigations and experiments gone successfully

    Asked by jamesquine to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      No! They often fail miserably. Even if this happens, we still learn something valuable and feed in what we have learned to design the next experiment. Thats science!

    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Certainly not! Sometimes I have programs running experiments for days, only to find out that a bug in the program means that the results are all nonsense. But, sometimes disasters like that actually lead to useful discoveries. That hasn’t really happened to me yet though.

    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Nope, I can be quite clumsy sometimes…

    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      damn you experiment *shakes fist at god of experiments* !!! Some experiments just NEVER work and you spend 6 months beating your head against a brick wall trying to get them to work. Sometimes they don’t work because there is some trick you are missing and sometimes the original published work you are trying to replicate is simply wrong. One of the most important things about being a scientist is recognising when it’s time to give up on an experiment and start looking for a different way to answer your question instead…

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