• Question: has any of your experiments gone terribly wrong?

    Asked by justinbieber to Colm, Eoin, Joseph, Lauren, Stephen on 14 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Stephen Scully

      Stephen Scully answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Well terribly I am not sure, but there have been things I was looking into for research that did not give the expected results.

    • Photo: Eoin O Colgain

      Eoin O Colgain answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      The only experiments I do are thought experiments. Hard to see any danger to mankind in these mental gymnastics.

    • Photo: Joseph Roche

      Joseph Roche answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      I burnt the hair off my arm once. Totally worth it.

    • Photo: colm bracken

      colm bracken answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      Hi justinbieber (ye right!), good question.
      Yes, for my final year project during my degree I visited an observatory in France to observe far away galaxies. We wanted to know how fast they were moving away from us so we had to use a spectrograph. The telescope technician put the wrong filter in so we could not detect the so-called H-Alpha line which is really easy to see. We did not find this out until we were analysing our data back in Ireland. It looked like our whole project was doomed but I eventually rescued it with really hard work. I was able to fix our data so that we could filter out some really week lines that we could then use for working out the speeds of the galaxies.
      In the end it worked out for the best as I think our supervisor was impressed with how we rescued it.
      So, that was probably really boring for you, sorry.

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