• Question: has any experiments gone wrong?

    Asked by shannon to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Absolutely … Experiments go wrong all the time and often we scientists learn more from the experiments that don’t work as we think they will because that means that we don’t understand the way things work like we thought we did… If you’re talking about disasters though I once used a plastic test tube over a bunsen burner instead of glass without noticing and it of course melted!

    • Photo: David Wilson

      David Wilson answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      For me the thing that goes wrong the most is the weather- I’ve had a few times when people have gone to telescopes to get data for me, only to find it’s too cloudy or windy to do any astronomy!

    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      All the time! That’s the fun, very occasionally something goes so wrong that you actually discover something completely different that you didn’t expect (but mostly it just fails and you have to try again, although at least my parasites don’t care if its cloudy or not!)

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