• Question: Have one of your experiments ever gone wrong?

    Asked by to James, Jennifer, Kim, Liam, Ricardo on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , .
    • Photo: Kimberley Lowe

      Kimberley Lowe answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Hi Radicalcookie,

      I dont tend to do experiments in my work, but a couple of times I have been dissecting fish and had blood squirt in my face! There’s nothing worse!

    • Photo: Jennifer Stephens

      Jennifer Stephens answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Hi Radicalcookie
      Experiments go wrong all the time!
      Sometimes we do experiments that no one else has ever done so we don’t know if the answer is right or wrong. That’s why we always repeat experiments to double check a result.

    • Photo: Ricardo Ramirez

      Ricardo Ramirez answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      It happens, but it is part of science. When you do an experiment, you need to test it. If it doesn’t work, you just find a way on how not to di it!

    • Photo: Liam Harvey

      Liam Harvey answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      It is part of the scientific process for things to go wrong.. perhaps a better question would be has anything ever gone according to plan ha

    • Photo: James Taylor

      James Taylor answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Of course. It wouldn’t be science and it wouldn’t be new and innovative if there wasn’t a risk of something messing up.

Comments

  • Photo: Shaylon

    Shaylon commented on :

    Yes, definitely! When I was doing my undergraduate degree, I worked in the field with house wrens. Several of them escaped while I was marking them, and flew away with my numbered bands before I could write down the ID numbers. One female also found the tiny (and very expensive) temperature tracker I’d put in her nest and totally wrecked it before shoving the remains out of her nest.
    But the important thing to remember is that it’s not always bad when an experiment doesn’t work the way you think it ‘should’. I’ve had data that gave me answers I didn’t expect and after I double-checked to make sure I’d done the process correctly, I still got the same answer. This meant I had to find out why that answer was true. So I came up with a whole new theory and wrote my MSc paper about that! I even got to present my findings at a conference. So unexpected can be very important for scientific discoveries!

  • jasaunderson commented on :

    I am a student and i broke a themometer and burnt my hand because of tiny mistakes either me or my lab partners have done