• Question: Have you ever failed in an experiment?

    Asked by anon-385014 to stephenraggett-batchen, sambrown, Paul Wiggins, paulterrill, maxdecarlosgenerowicz, Anirudh Sharma on 21 Oct 2025.
    • Photo: Max de Carlos Generowicz

      Max de Carlos Generowicz answered on 21 Oct 2025:

      Yes, absolutely! And on many different levels…

      Sometimes, I’ll perform an experiment that I expect to go one way and it goes completely differently, but in a way that makes no sense! In these cases, I’ll usually review the equipment and break down the results I obtained. Usually I’ve made a silly mistake somewhere, but sometimes it’s not obvious at all and I can spend weeks scratching my head and trying to find ways to solve the problem.

    • Photo: Stephen Raggett-Batchen

      Stephen Raggett-Batchen answered on 10 Nov 2025:

      In my sector we don’t specifically do experiments, but our design development and calculations for solutions don’t always give us the answer we want. So that could be viewed as an experiment I suppose. And to answer the question – this happens a lot and this is why we make sure things work before we design and build them!

    • Photo: Paul Wiggins

      Paul Wiggins answered on 12 Nov 2025:

      Yes, many! But in some ways, I don’t think any experiment is a failure. You always learn something – either about yourself, the materials or instruments you work with, or about the process of experimentation. Sometimes the most satisfying successes are when you have a string of ‘failures’ and after improvements and changes, you finally get the right result at the end!

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