• Question: whatis the worst thing that happem in a exprament?

    Asked by byrnetj01 to Richard, Prateek, Liz, Jim, Amelia on 22 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by lalevbb01.
    • Photo: Jim Caryl

      Jim Caryl answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Well, the easy answer is ‘nothing’. The worse experiment is one that gives you no result, because the actual experiment itself failed to work, likely due to a technical problem.

      In an experiment you are trying to test a hypothesis (an idea about how something works). We will have made a prediction, based on evidence and the hypothesis used to describe that evidence, about what we would expect to see if we change something in the thing we’re looking at. Sometimes we see what we predicted, other times we get something totally different. Both of these are a result, and whilst we may be frustrated if our hypothesis is proven false, it is still a result.

      Getting NO result though, so you don’t know whether your hypothesis was right or wrong, is really annoying, and means you have to figure out what the problem was :-/

    • Photo: Amelia Markey

      Amelia Markey answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      Jim’s right getting no result is really annoying. But I always think the worst thing is when you realise you’ve done something silly like missed a step out of your experiment or done a step wrong. Sometimes this happens when you’re juggling a lot of different experiments at once and it’s really annoying because you have to start all over again 🙁 but it happens to the best of us, even scientists make mistakes 😉

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