• Question: has one of your experiments ever gone horrible wrong

    Asked by to Tom, Tamas, Linda, Johanna, David on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Linda Cremonesi

      Linda Cremonesi answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Actually, I think all experiments at a certain point get really really wrong!
      One thing you should always remember though is that *nature never lies and never failsMATOMO_URL Our interpretation of nature on the other side could be completely wrong :/
      A few years ago I remember an International community claimed that “neutrinos were faster than the speed of light”. Well, they found out after a few months that there was a screw not very tight in their experiment, and so their measure was wrong… :/ This means, everybody can commit a mistake!

    • Photo: David Davila

      David Davila answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Linda’s right – almost ALL of my experiments go horribly wrong >.>
      But I don’t mean I created a monster or something! I just mean that the experiments we do are really complicated, even for the BEST scientists, and it can be really easy to mess something up. Even when you do it perfectly, sometimes luck just has it that your experiment doesn’t work, or sometimes you have to go back and think of a better way to answer your question.

      I would say that this process – trying to answer a small question, trying an experiment, failing, and trying again – is probably 80% of what being a scientist is!!

    • Photo: Thomas Smith

      Thomas Smith answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      My answer to this is “yes”!

      Most of the fires that we work with when we’re on fieldwork are actually set on purpose so that the scientists have time to set up all of their equipment, you could call them experiments! This involves a lot of careful planning. The small section of forest that we burn is surrounded by a massive “fire break” — a large area of land that will not burn — this stops the fire from spreading into the surrounding forest. We rely on firefighter experts to make sure that the fire doesn’t “escape” and set fire to the rest of the forest.

      Unfortunately, at one fire that my team worked at the weather was so hot and windy that large pieces of burning trees were thrown hundreds of metres from the fire and beyond the fire break, setting fire to the surrounding forest. It took almost a week and a few million Canadian dollars for the fire service to control and extinguish the fire which burned a much larger area than planned!

    • Photo: Johanna Fischer

      Johanna Fischer answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Well, especially in the beginning a lot of experiments went wrong, and when you work with nasty chemicals this is usually not very pleasant, so I used to go home with quite a bit of an headache, due to organic solvents.

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