• Question: do you think experament will work

    Asked by cherrypop231 to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 9 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Sophie Holles

      Sophie Holles answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      I’ve just finished some experiments and I’m analysing my results at the moment! I’ve found out that boat noise makes eggs of sea hares (marine slugs) less likely to hatch. Also boat noise makes coral reef fish stressed (they flap their gill coverings faster enough to get more oxygen to their gills). In the experiments from the first year of my phd I found out that ship noise makes cod larvae startle and if they listen to noise for a long time then their body condition goes down and they are easier to catch by predators!

    • Photo: Nathan Green

      Nathan Green answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      No. usually they dont but thats the fun part. When an experiment gives an answer you didnt expect or goes wrong in some way that tells you something new too. Ive just been analysis some hospital data and it didnt work but then I realised that there are a load of people in the data I hadnt even noticed before who do lots of strange things when they go into hospital; they stay in hospital for ages but nothing really happens to them. I think they might just like the food!

    • Photo: Jason King

      Jason King answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Like Nathan said, experiments are frustrating things, and probably don’t work more than they do. I reckon if over 30% of my experiments work I’m doing OK (although this depends a lot on what kind of research you are doing!). It’s always going to be difficult because you want to look at things that haven’t been done before (or no-one has been able to do before!). That said, it all adds to the excitement when things do go well, and it’s often the experiments that don’t go as you predicted that are the most interesting!

    • Photo: Edward Bovill

      Edward Bovill answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Science is mostly about making educated guesses and so, very often, things don’t turn out as you’d hoped or expected them to.

      I’d guess that out of all the experiments I do, only 25% of them will work as I’d intended, another 25% will give me results I didn’t expect but turn out to be useful and the rest just don’t work at all.

      However, even the ones that fail completely tell me something about how my experiment worked, so in a way they are just as useful!

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