• Question: What do you find most difficult when carrying out an experiment?

    Asked by adelexox to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 22 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 22 Jun 2012:

      Hi adelexox

      For me, the most difficult part of carrying out an experiment (for me that is a climate model run) is when you can’t get it to work and you can’t see why it won’t work. It is so frustrating! However, when you get it to work, it is massively rewarding!

    • Photo: Gemma Purser

      Gemma Purser answered on 22 Jun 2012:

      Agreed James P!!
      when you cant get the thing to work but you really really want it to work. Like for me building an experimental rig and pressurising it up with gas and then it starts to leak and I cant find where the leak is! doh! Sometimes you just have to give it your best shot and thats all you can do. We cant always get the answers first time so by an experiment failing you still have learnt more by doing the experiment than before you did it!….if that makes sense!?

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 23 Jun 2012:

      Hi adelexox,
      Looking at the bigger picture, the real difficulty when studying the earth is that you can’t really do experiments. I’d love to build an actual, life size volcano to be able to do experiments on it, but obviously you can’t do that. Similarly, I’m sure the climate change guys would love to build a planet and investigate the effects of different green-house gas emissions.

      Since we can’t build life-size experiments, we have to do things like build computer models to simulate conditions, and we make observations of the things that happen on the earth to try to work out what’s going on.

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 24 Jun 2012:

      hey adelexox,

      I have to agree with the other answers! When you think something should work and you test it and it does something really strange (usually the complete opposite of what you expected it to do!!) it is so frustrating. Honestly i think scientists spend the majority of their time trying to solve mistakes we made!

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