Question: why do your experiments most of the time not work

Robert Woolfson answered on 25 Jun 2013:

It’s the nature of science, particularly chemistry and biology. Quite often nobody knows how to do what you’re trying to do and so we’re taking guesses. Educated guesses, but guesses all the same. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

It sounds a little strange, but quite often an experiment that doesn’t work tells you just as much as an experiment that does. From my experiments that fail, I can often work out what went wrong and how to stop it from happening again. While it is incredibly frustrating when a couple of weeks of work is a failure, I learn some very important lessons.

Lesson number 1: don’t screw stuff up by being stupid. A hard, but useful lesson.