• Question: Have you ever failed an experiment? What do you learn from that

    Asked by RitaN on 26 Feb 2026.
    • Photo: Alistair Glasse

      Alistair Glasse answered on 26 Feb 2026:

      Experiments can go wrong and fail to provide any useful measurements (different from when the measurement is unexpected but ‘real’, thats a good thing. My latest example of a proper failure was a test to irradiate some spare JWST filters using the proton beam generated by a hospital cyclotron. Unfotuantely the beam cut out a few milliseconds after the start of the test (it’s a safety feature for clinical operation), so no filters got irradiated and we only found out months later. We’re going to rerun the test in the next few months….

    • Photo: Lorelei Robertson

      Lorelei Robertson answered on 26 Feb 2026:

      All the time! I think it’s where a lot of our answers can get solved, and we learn a lot. Normally in my case it will tell us what not to do, which can be just as important to learn vs getting an experiment right first time, as we can learn what the limits of certain samples can be, for future analysis.

    • Photo: Becky Paddock

      Becky Paddock answered on 27 Feb 2026:

      Absolutely! Things fail or we make mistakes all the time and that is the best way to learn how to do things better next time. You can gain just as much information from knowing how something doesn’t work as you can from when it does work.

Comments

  • Photo: James L

    James L commented on :

    Science is about 90% failure. You learn much more from your failures than you do from your successes and you have to learn to be comfortable with that. When you do succeed though it makes that success that much sweeter.

    For example, when I moved from Australia to the UK suddenly our bacteria stopped growing and I had no idea why. Applying the scientific methods and examining every aspect of the culture of those bacteria we were able to work out that there were trace minerals in the water that were essential for bacterial growth, and they were absent in the water in the UK. Had we never moved we would never have found that out.