• Question: have you ever found something out on an experiment that you weren't supposed to find out?

    Asked by rachieb97 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 16 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @rachieb97
      Thanks for your question.
      I’ve occasionally found out things I wasn’t expecting to find out, but most often the thing I’ve found out is that my experiment doesn’t work very well, because I didn’t have enough people to test, or because the design I used needed to be improved! Sometimes science can be disheartening, particularly when you’re beginning and you don’t know how to do things in the best way. Luckily if you’ve got good colleagues they can help you out and you can make your work better!

      Hope this answers your question 🙂

    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @rachieb97

      Great question! No one tells you what you are or are not supposed to find out in an experiment. The world is a mystery, but results from science shouldn’t be a secret. However, sometimes your results are very unexpected. When I started my PhD I had a theory about reading development that wasn’t supported by the results of any of my experiments, so now I have a different theory. As Suzi says, sometimes you discover that your experiments weren’t as good as you hoped and your results could be explained several different ways – that happens quite a bit.

      I hope that answered your question.

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      The best experiments are the ones that give you unexpected results! You usually design an experiment trying to answer a specific question, but the answer you get may be the answer to a completely different one … Seriously, it happens all the time. I’m afraid that the time it happened to me isn’t that exciting, but the big set of experiments I did about French accents gave me one result about the way people spoke which was completely unexpected! I was delighted though when I did some more experiments looking to see whether that result was still true for other speakers, and I found out that it was.

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