Question: Have any of your experiments ever gone badly wrong?

Andrew Devitt answered on 17 Jun 2013:

I remember that when I was doing my PhD I left a bit of equipment running. It was an evening. I was heading out with my girlfriend to the cinema. It wasn’t unusual to leave equipment running for hours. The trouble with this however was the the equipment was water running through it (to cool it) and the waster water went down the sink ….. but the sink didn’t drain quickly enough. I came back to work about midnight to find that nearly the whole floor of our building was flooded and the water was just about to hit the carpet of our Professor’s office! Aghhhhhhhhh. Thank god for automatic water vacuums. I’ve never admitted to that before. No one knew!