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Asked by anon-255556 to Katherine, Tom on 21 May 2020. This question was also asked by anon-258227.
Question: hi, have you ever done an experiment and it went wrong ?
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Katherine Haxton answered on 21 May 2020:
Yes. Quite a few of my experiments have gone wrong but that’s just how science works. One of my worst ones where I made a stupid mistake was when I had been making a new molecule in the lab. The molecule reacts with water to form a sticky goo so I was being very careful to keep water away from my reactions. I had to do 4 different reactions and two of them took a week. The final step was to remove the solvent by heating the flask in a basin of water. I forgot that hot and cold glassware look the same, dropped the hot flask back into the basin of water and ruined my experiment. I just burst out laughing.
Comments
Craig commented on :
Yes and unfortunately on quite a regular basis. I once had to repeat close to two months of work because I had made an error early in the process that meant everything after that point was slightly wrong. Thankfully I had made a lot of good notes so it only took a couple of weeks to repeat everything but it was still very annoying.
Steve commented on :
All the time!
Kat commented on :
All the time. I have accidentally caused a fire and singed my eyebrows when I made a mistake once!
Science can often feel like magic! I could do the same experiment multiple times but get different results each time too. What makes it fun is trying again and working out what went wrong. It’s ok to make mistakes.
Matt commented on :
All the time, and no matter how long you’ve worked in a lab it only takes dropping a flask with product in to ruin your day!
Heather commented on :
Hey, almost every experiment I’ve ever done has ‘gone wrong’ as in that they didn’t do what I wanted them to, but I would say that they’re still a success if you can get any results out of them! Even by that standard I’ve still had a lot fail, mainly things where I’ve spent however long trying to make a nice solid product and then I go to isolate it by filtration and everything just pours through the filter!
Matthew commented on :
Lots of times! Most commonly I end up losing too much of the substance I want, and it just goes down the sink!
Fred commented on :
yes when i was an undergraduate we used to dry organic solvents by distillation with sodium wire, when you finished you had to “kill” off the sodium with ethanol slowly . if it got too hot if you added the sodium to the ethanol too fast it could catch fire, i once managed to start a small fire like this, though it was in a fume cupboard so, by using a CO2 extinguisher i managed to put it out quite quickly and no big damage was caused.
Andy commented on :
We once had a foreign student who was doing a research degree who forgot to take out the die with fragments of sodium out and se we had a few near miss fires.
We as techies ended up doing a lot of fire fighting as a result of their actions!
Hamish commented on :
It’s a very natural part of science that experiment go wrong! If they went right all the time then you aren’t experimenting hard enough 🙂
Sometimes you learn more from an experiment that went wrong than the ones that go right. You can look back at what your original expectations were and see if you were right or wrong and then learn something new. It’s all part of the fun!
Daniel commented on :
SO. MANY. TIMES.
Sometimes it’s because I’ve made a stupid mistake, and sometimes it’s just because the chemistry didn’t behave as expected. Experiments going wrong can be as valuable as experiments going right. At the very least, at least you know what not to do next time!
On the other hand, in my line of work (I work in quality control), sometimes an experiment “going wrong” is actually a good result – it can prove that something I are testing isn’t what I was expecting it to be! So even though the result isn’t what I was expecting, I’ve still found out some valuable information.
That can be one of the hardest things to learn (and I still struggle with it sometimes!) – an experiment going wrong does not mean everything has failed!
Nicola commented on :
Yes, method development always takes time and there is usually a few failures before I get it right!
Andy commented on :
Yes quite a few times especially when I was doing semi micro analysis to determine what was in a mixture made up by the technical staff. Same applies when I worked at the University doing research on cements and organic binding agents added to them.