• Question: what would you do if an experiment went wrong?

    Asked by anon-322302 on 22 Mar 2022.
    • Photo: Amit Vernekar

      Amit Vernekar answered on 22 Mar 2022:

      Think over it and see the possibilities of new findings in the failed experiments.

    • Photo: Andrew Parrott

      Andrew Parrott answered on 22 Mar 2022:

      Depends on what went wrong. But probably it would be a case of working out why it went wrong and then trying again.

    • Photo: Ian McKinley

      Ian McKinley answered on 22 Mar 2022:

      It depends on the experiment and why it went wrong. In some cases you can just quickly fix the problem and try again. In other cases, if a big experiment went badly wrong, you need to spend a lot of time finding out what happened. In such cases, sometimes you learn more than you would have done if everything went as expected.

    • Photo: Stephen Doughty

      Stephen Doughty answered on 23 Mar 2022:

      Spend some time thinking about what needs to be improved – and sometimes thinking more about the unexpected results that the “wrong” experiment threw up and what that new result means.

    • Photo: Jasmine Almond

      Jasmine Almond answered on 23 Mar 2022:

      Good question. Sometimes an experiment going wrong can be a great learning opportunity. First step would be to find out what went wrong and why.

    • Photo: TJ Preston

      TJ Preston answered on 23 Mar 2022:

      Try again. And try again.

    • Photo: Veselina Georgieva

      Veselina Georgieva answered on 24 Mar 2022:

      I would be happy and just try again until I don’t get it correctly

    • Photo: Graeme Barker

      Graeme Barker answered on 24 Mar 2022:

      If it was due to something I did wrong, tidy up and start again! If it’s an unexpected result on the other hand, that’s more interesting – it forces us to think about how our chemistry works, and how that changes our understanding of it.

    • Photo: Sophie Strickfuss

      Sophie Strickfuss answered on 30 Mar 2022:

      I would try and understand what went wrong. I’ll try again, making one change, and assess the effect of change, until I can work out why the experiment went wrong.

    • Photo: Mark Ridgill

      Mark Ridgill answered on 1 Apr 2022:

      Try and understand why and then decide if it’s worth repeating. The clues in the name if things were guaranteed to work then they wouldn’t be experiments.

      In organic chemistry we tend to use reactions developed before and use them on different starting materials, this doesn’t always work.

      It might be that you tried the reaction with and old bottle of reagent so you try a new bottle or change the conditions – heat it up more or for longer.

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