Question: Has envy of your experiments gone wrongs and why

Freya Addison answered on 11 Nov 2019:

Yes. All the time experiments go wrong, and that is a massive part of doing science. At school sometimes we get fixated for the exams to get perfect results but this doesn’t happen in reality for a number of reasons. Experiments can go wrong because we might have missed a step and didn’t set it up properly. When we do experiments on the atmospheric research aircraft, the equipment can freeze over, so we can’t record anything during that period, when we go to a warmer level, sometimes we can reset the instruments sometimes it just got too cold and doesn’t want to operate any longer and we can’t go out to the wing to fiddle with it! We were recently working with a new piece of equipment called a Helikite (think of a small blimp with a kite attached horizontally underneath it), and it was the first time any of us had used it after some training, and we were doing experiments. Lots of things went wrong, some our fault, some down to faulty equipment, and one part down to us not reading the weather properly so we didn’t fill up the Helikite with enough Helium. We had a situation where the laptop wasn’t charging in the field because the dedicated battery we had for it couldn’t cope with that amount of charge so we had to go and get something that could, but it meant we wasted money and lost ~3hrs of data. Part of doing fieldwork and experiments is to think on your feet and dealing with it when it goes wrong, its quite exciting but can also be frustrating. In terms of coding and processing the results from experiments, half of it is debugging code where you have put a symbol in the wrong place or misspelt something or you have put in a phrase which you would use in one coding language but you are using a different coding language. If something goes perfectly, I get suspicious, and will definitely look at the results carefully to see if they are sensible.