• Question: are you always determined that your experiment will work??

    Asked by to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 17 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      Um, I’m always hopeful they will work! Experience has taught me that they often don’t, but they often don’t go spectacularly wrong either, so they are still useful, just not of publishable quality!

    • Photo: Nicola Rogers

      Nicola Rogers answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      No, sometimes I am very sceptical about experiments, and expect them not to work, but make sure I try them to justify why I will rule them out – and sometimes I am pleasantly surprised and the work much better than I expected!

    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      No. I would like it if they did, but the better ones are the ones that don’t turn out the way you expect, then you have to search for the reason why. I think that is much more fun and much better science than doing an experiment to prove you are right. I am always disappointed that we tend not to publish the things that didn’t work because it would be very useful to be able to search what people have done before, how and what happened rather than ignoring the bits that we don’t have an explanation for.

    • Photo: Roy Adkin

      Roy Adkin answered on 17 Mar 2014:


      Yes, definitely…if you’re going to start an experiment you should always go at it determined it will work but the good thing with experiments is that if it doesn’t work it is still a good outcome…you know it doesn’t work so you can alter the condition or parameters of the experiment to see if it will work.
      My experiment to make an organic compound didn’t work so I tried changing the temperature and the amounts of reagents I used…it still didn’t work! So I decided to move onto something else and go back to it later. It worked out well though because it means that when I go back to it later I will have a better understanding of what I am doing and I can get on with it faster. It’s all good experience.

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