• Question: Have one of your exsperiments ever gone wrong

    Asked by michaelo to Claire, Elizabeth, Manolis, Mark, Zach on 8 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by rosieroo223, alia, .
    • Photo: Zach Dixon

      Zach Dixon answered on 8 Mar 2014:

      Unfortunately my experiments often go wrong, it is actually quite common in science!

      Things can go wrong for a lot of different reasons, experiments can be quite complicated depending on what you want to study.

      Sometimes things going wrong is a good thing, it means you have the challenge of finding the problem, or a new type of experiment to use instead!

    • Photo: Mark Wallace

      Mark Wallace answered on 8 Mar 2014:

      Most of my experiments don’t work! But that’s normal. Maybe one in every 20 ideas work out.

      Being a scientist is all about trying to figure out new things – you don’t know what’s going to work when you start. That’s what makes it exciting. You’ve got to try a lot of things before you discover something new that no one’s thought of before.

    • Photo: Elizabeth Ratcliffe

      Elizabeth Ratcliffe answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Hi michaelo, being totally honest, lots of my experiments have gone wrong…I once held the record in our lab for the person who messed up their experiment earliest in the day…and latest in the day! This happens when you’re pushing science and doing new things, it doesn’t work first time every time. Sometimes it’s a geniune mistake like accidentally dropping your precious sample that’s taken four hours to process (gees!)Sometimes things just don’t go the way you expect but you can learn from this, I’ve learnt better ways of setting up my robots and experiments and this also helps when I teach others

    • Photo: Claire Vinten

      Claire Vinten answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      This is interesting, because my research is slightly different to the research done by other scientists. Instead of doing experiments in a laboratory, I do experiments using people! This normally involves me interviewing people to find out about their opinions about certain topics. These types of experiments can”t really go wrong! Any data you manage to collect will be valuable – the worst thing that can happen is that the person you are interviewing does not say a lot, or says far too much!

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