• Question: what is your least favorite science experience?

    Asked by senara to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 17 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      My least favourite science experience would be when I spent 6 months working on something and in the end it turned out my calculations were wrong! I had used a mathematical theorem in a way that, apparently, wasn’t correct and I had to abandon months of work!

      (In my defense, no one I’ve talked to knows why that particular bit of maths isn’t correct, we just know now that it gives the wrong answer…)

    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      @sen#science I really really hate it when I am in a room of people discussing science and I seem to be the only one that doesn’t understand it. It happens quite a lot unfortunately. Then I go and ask somebody I know well (who I don’t mind feeling foolish in front of) and get them to explain over and over. And then when I get it, I’m happy again!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      I think one of my least favorite experiences was trying to do some data reduction on data from the VLA. This data had some bizarre problem with it (which we never figured out why it was there), so instead of being able to go through the standard procedure to get the data into a usable form, I had to spend weeks going through the data manually to spot problems by eye, which was INCREDIBLY tedious.

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