Question: @ciaran, what is your least favourite thing about science? Why is this your least favourite thing?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

My least favourite thing about science is that sometimes you don’t get the results you were hoping for. This usually means you did something wrong while planning and building the experiment, and you just have to do it again more carefully, but sometimes it’s because the thing you were looking for isn’t there. If that happens, you have to consider that you might have been asking the wrong question to begin with. You need to think about the questions you ask very carefully, or the answers won’t be much use. Sometimes, you think you’ve gotten the right question, because you spent ages working on it and figuring out the best way to answer it, and then the answers don’t make any sense because you overlooked some tiny detail that changes everything.

This hasn’t happened me yet, but one of the people I live with had this problem doing his research project for his masters degree. His results didn’t make any sense based on what we already knew, and he spent two years trying to make it work.

He finally found out that the problem was that he was basing his work off another scientist’s results, and that scientist had made a big mistake in some of the numbers. He was really upset by that, he’d spent two years working on something that was never going to work because this guy hadn’t caught one of his own mistakes. He did manage to get his project done, but it took an extra year because the other scientist’s mistakes had to be fixed first.