• Question: Have any experiments gone wrong, if so what went wrong, did you do the same thing again?

    Asked by sapphire blue to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane, Julian on 16 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      Most of my programs fail at one time or another, but apart from wasting time, and being very annoying – there aren’t too many casualties of these issues.
      I did occupy one of the fastest computers in the world basically twiddling its fingers for a whole day one time when I typed in the wrong instructions – that was embarassing!

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      I don’t really do experiments anymore, but I do write computer code to analyse data from the really large telescopes, to try to make sense of it and learn something new about galaxies. Things go wrong all the time! Sometimes writing code is very frustrating, because even a tiny mistake can stop it working, and you have to learn how to explain what you want to do in ‘computer language’, very logically. Even though science is our job now, we still make lots of mistakes. Just because we’ve been doing it for a long time doesn’t mean we don’t mess up! 🙂

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