• Question: Are there any faults in your studies and reseaching, as well as when you are perform experiments?

    Asked by katrinanommypoo to Charlotte, Dhvanil, Frank, Jim, Leila on 18 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jim O Doherty

      Jim O Doherty answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      Usually yes, and we try to make certain assumptions to account for the faults we might encounter (i.e. the time of the experiment didn’t matter, or the temperature of the room didn’t change). Science is about making sure that if there are faults, you at least know where they came from!

    • Photo: Dhvanil Karia

      Dhvanil Karia answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      As far as experiments go they are there in the first place to identify our fault in the theoretical predictions we made (also mistake in performing them also happen but we try to minimize these)…….and for things that we cannot find out using experiments/other methods we make assumptions which can be considered as faults … but we have very good reasons behind our assumptions

    • Photo: Frank Soboczenski

      Frank Soboczenski answered on 20 Mar 2013:

      Sometimes I do have faults in my studies but these also give me lots of interesting data to explore. I then redesign and improve my next experiment 🙂

    • Photo: Leila Nichol

      Leila Nichol answered on 20 Mar 2013:

      Absolutely, all the time, we learn best from experiments that go wrong. Also, in every measurement we do there’s always a certain amount of uncertainty, so normally we repeat it a few times to make sure our result wasn’t just a fluke one-off, we look at the precision of our measurements and then we can calculate the overall error as a number with respect to our final measurement. This is an indication of how much confidence we have in our final result.

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