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Asked by anon-233323 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 11 Nov 2019.
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Rebecca Shaw answered on 11 Nov 2019:
In all honesty, a lot of your results can’t really be expected or planned. We hypothesise (some better than others) what we expect the outcome will be,but we can never really say for certain this will be a result!
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Varun Ramaswamy answered on 11 Nov 2019:
The truth is, you cannot expect how any experiment is gonna turn out. It might be the simplest experiment in the book, but it can STILL not work like you want it to, for some unknown reason and you won’t know until it happens.
So the most important thing you should learn as a scientist is to stop expecting.
That way, any result you get from your experiment will pleasantly surprise you.
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Samantha Firth answered on 12 Nov 2019:
You can’t expect things to turn out the way you think they will! You start by making a hypothesis – you predict what you think might happen – and then you carry out your experiment and, a good amount of the time, something different happens!
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Anna Kalorkoti answered on 14 Nov 2019:
There’s an idea of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”. “Known unknowns” are things that we don’t know, but we’re aware that we don’t know them. For example, I might test a material in a tank of water to see how it’ll survive in the sea, but I know that in the actual sea, barnacles might try to grow on it, and in my tank of water, there are no barnacles. So “how does barnacle growth affect this?” is something that I know I don’t know. Because I know I don’t know it, I can try to find out the answer, or make sure I design something stronger than it needs to be so that even if the barnacles do weaken it, it should still be strong enough.
“Unknown unknowns” are the really dangerous ones: they’re the things that we don’t know about and haven’t even considered. Because we don’t even know that they’re out there, we can’t plan for or expect them, and that can be dangerous.
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