Question: Have you ever performed an experiment which had unusual results or results that were the opposite of what you were expecting (did not support your hypothesis)?
Keywords: experiment, hypothesis, outcome, unusual
By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
Hi davidmcafee,
All the time. Most experiments you do your not sure what is really going to happen. You may hypothesise based on previous experiments but often the results take you into another direction or just simply don’t go to plan. This is a natural part of scientific discovery and an essential step in discovering new things from the unexpected.
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Yep it happens. As I was mainly working with pesticides we would usually know what the general outcome would be, but the trials would show us exactly to what degree the products worked. However sometimes a product would not do what we expected at all and that’s the whole reason the trials have to be done =)
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Yes, disproving something is often more powerful, it is part of how you refine your hypothoses.
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Yes, once we were trying to make a plant resistant to salinity but ended up with plant that just won’t set seeds!
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Hi Davidmcafee,
Yes! This can be relatively common in animal behaviour. We hypothesise that animals will behave in a certain way in specific situations, but we are only making educated guesses based on other work. It’s tricky because animals may interpret a situation really differently to what we expect – they cope really well with something we think will be very stressful, or they will be very stressed by something we think is simple.
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