• Question: Did you ever do a experiment and it didnt work and then how did you make it better or work more

    Asked by aodm2008 to Mark, Souvik on 22 May 2020. This question was also asked by twocup295.
    • Photo: Mark Kennedy

      Mark Kennedy answered on 22 May 2020:

      Unfortunately, this is something that happens a lot. A few years ago, I used a space telescope to try and measure the number of X-rays coming from a star. However, it didn’t work as the star was too faint to detect. In astronomy, it’s very rare that you get a second chance to do an experiment like this, as using a space telescope costs a lot of money. So, instead, we focused on writing about why the experiment didn’t work, and publishing that report, so that people in the future wouldn’t make the same mistake we did.

Comments

  • Photo: aodm2008

    aodm2008 commented on :

    that’s a really good answer thanks so much mark

  • Photo: Karen

    Karen commented on :

    Experiments often don’t work the first time – sometimes because you have set it up incorrectly (that gets less over time!) and sometimes because something that you didn’t expect to happen happens. If we were always sure that an experiment would work, we wouldn’t need to do them very often! When an experiment doesn’t work, you need to look at exactly what happened and try to figure out why it didn’t work. Then you set it up again (in biology this is often relatively straight forward but it can be expensive so it isn’t always possible) and see what happens the next time. It can take a while to get things right. I do experiments on plants so when you’re working with a living organism that can make things complicated too. I had a student who planted the wrong bit of the plant so that experiment didn’t work! (that was funny and easy to fix). Other times we might want to see how a particular part of a plant responds to say different amounts of light but we might find something more interesting – I was growing plants in different light qualities to see if their leaf shape changed but we found that this did not happen but the leaves were bigger (but roughly the same shape) in different treatments, so that was quite interesting.