• Question: Have you ever failed on a experiment?

    Asked by yussuf_hazard_juonir to Hephzi, Imogen, Jen, Jennifer, Tom on 9 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Thomas Barrett

      Thomas Barrett answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Sadly it is rather common for things to not go perfectly. The wizardry comes in when you can take a ‘failed’ experiment and get something useful out of it 🙂

      But its tough when things go wrong, especially when your samples cost hundreds of pounds per 1 gram at times. Luckily nothing has gone wrong on the really valuable stuff yet. Everyone is usually ok with it. Things like this happen all the time and learn to not doing again!

    • Photo: Jennifer Rudd

      Jennifer Rudd answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Yes all the time! When I was finishing my PhD I was trying to do an experiment again that I had done earlier and even after trying it ten times I couldn’t reproduce the initial result. I was really frustrated and had to write it into my thesis as something irreproducible. It’s ok though because somebody else might be able to come along and fix it. That’s how science develops.

    • Photo: Hephzi Tagoe

      Hephzi Tagoe answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Oh yes! more times than one. Things don’t always go to plan but sometimes it turns out that you discover something new from a failed experiment so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    • Photo: Jen Machin

      Jen Machin answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      Definitely! The first time it happens it can be really annoying, but you learn to make the best of it and try to improve on your next experiment 🙂 Sometimes you learn more when experiments go wrong!

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