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Asked by feds532agha26 on 23 Feb 2026.
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Michael Gillin answered on 23 Feb 2026:
Yes, absolutely.
One of the main things about science is that mistakes and accidents happen. Students often get taught that failure is the best teacher, and it’s right. Simple things like breaking glassware happen frequently, but if you can learn from it (how to hold it more tightly, how to store it properly, etc.), then fewer mistakes happen.
Some of the worst mistakes I’ve made have involved trying to get robots to do chemistry for me. I’ve accidentally stained a £1.2 million robot pink, I’ve damaged the cable to a £20,000 robotic arm, and I’ve crashed into an expensive balance using a robot. But because they happened, I learned from them, made some adjustments to my setups, and everything worked out in the end.
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Mark Ridgill answered on 25 Feb 2026:
Not all the time but quite often!
Many great scientific discoveries were probably accidents – like Alexander Fleming not doing his washing up and discovering penicillin!
I once added the wrong reagent to a chemical reaction and got a related by-product which turned out to be be extremely potent and we used it as the standard in our project test after that! -
Santosh Mahabala answered on 27 Feb 2026:
Many times, and I like to know what mistakes I made, so I dont repeat them.
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Olivia Williams answered on 10 Mar 2026:
Yes! But that is how you learn. If I do make a mistake I will look over what happened and why and make sure I don’t do the same again. Nobody is perfect so some mistakes are inevitable
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