• Question: have you had an experiment that went wrong?

    Asked by anon-234837 to Robert, Robert, Robert, Richard, Rich, Richard, Rhys, Martin, Aaron on 19 Sep 2019.
    • Photo: Martin Coath

      Martin Coath answered on 19 Sep 2019:

      Experiments never go wrong. You can learn something from any outcome, even those you didn’t want and didn’t expect. As a scientist you have to be open minded about what happens and happy to incorporate the craziest results in to your view of what is going on. (Actually not all scientists are any good at doing this 🙂 )

    • Photo: Robert Ives

      Robert Ives answered on 19 Sep 2019:

      Hello. I kind of agree with Martin. Experiments only go wrong if somebody makes a mistake in how they are carrying out their experiment. However, even with a mistake, there is something to be learnt. We never quite know what the results of an experiment will be and if we did know, then it wouldn’t be an experiment. Often we learn more from experiments with unexpected and strange results – that is when good scientists start to question and understand why things have happened and many Nobel prizes have been won by scientists who ‘stumbled’ across something new.

    • Photo: Robert Dempsey

      Robert Dempsey answered on 20 Sep 2019:

      I’ve had some experiments where we couldn’t quite get the stimuli to work (a psychological study based on reading) – we spent a fair bit of time piloting different stimuli without seeing any changes in people’s reading times (which we had expected).

      Like the others have said here about learning from experiments, it’s probably something about what we were looking at which isn’t easy to explore via our reading experiment so maybe there’s no real effect to be found. Lots to learn when things do not go to plan!

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