• Question: do you ever get frustrated when you get an experiment wrong?

    Asked by leahella to Carla, Madgie, Nick, Vicky, Werner on 14 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Werner Muller

      Werner Muller answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      This is quite interesting. I think an experiment is never wrong. May be the idea was wrong. I always try to look at the results in an unbiased way. It can be more worrying if the experiment works to well. One has to be very careful to interpret the experiments correctly.

    • Photo: Vicky Forster

      Vicky Forster answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Good question, and the answer is definitely yes. During my PhD, I was trying to make an experiment work for six months – when I finally got it to work, It was an amazing feeling! Those six months though were really difficult, although I learned a lot about how to problem solve and stay upbeat even when everything was going wrong.

    • Photo: Marlene Lorgen

      Marlene Lorgen answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Like Vicky said, it can be very frustrating trying to get something to work, and perhaps the most frustrating thing is when after months of failures, it is a tiny thing that you have overlooked which has stopped it from working all along! It can be hard to stay upbeat when this sort of thing happens, but it is all part of the learning process!

    • Photo: Nick Groves-Kirkby

      Nick Groves-Kirkby answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Yes, absolutely! Even something as simple as trying to copy someone else’s experiment can be unbelievably difficult.

      I remember spending several weeks trying to get an experiment to work, and I couldn’t work out why it wouldn’t. In the end all I was doing wrong was not mixing the ingredients violently enough. Things like that are definitely frustrating.

      Now I mainly analyse other people’s experimental data, so I get frustrated when I think they haven’t recorded their results properly, and things like that!

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