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Asked by chantellerose to Betul, Bridget, Ceri-Wyn, Laurel, Maria on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: Scientist. This question was also asked by aimeeenglish.
Question: has any experiment you've done ever gone seriously wrong??
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Laurel Fogarty answered on 18 Jun 2010:
Well as far as getting results from them, lots have gone wrong but I have never made anything explode… I have damaged expensive computers but that is not as exciting!
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Betul Arslan answered on 18 Jun 2010:
every time 🙂 experiments tend to go wrong, to teach you something. in the beginning I used to feel dumb but then I realized that if everything is going right, there must be something wrong about it 🙂 I did a lot of mistakes, personal ones too, like ‘forgetting’ to add things and stuff, but I am glad I was with a patient mentor who was ok with it and helped me be more organized.
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Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2010:
Hee hee! I was trying to remove the oxygen from some seawater in the lab once (I wanted to use deoxygenated water in an experiment to compare it to results using oxygenated water). Obviously you can’t remove ALL the oxygen from water but you can get rid of a lot of dissolved oxygen by heating the water up to a really high temperature then bubbling nitrogen though as the water cools to replace some of the oxygen. I was doing this using a flask and some rubber tubing and stupidly the flask was sealed too tightly (I didn’t want extra O2 seeping in!) and it was getting FULL of gas! Obviously the whole thing exploded and the flask smashed. I nearly had a heart attack! Luckily I was on my own so no one saw this rather embarrassing lack of common sense! What a numpty!
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Maria Pawlowska answered on 22 Jun 2010:
Hi,
Thanks for the question. I’ve never had an spectacular explosions, but I’ve had some pretty nasty spills. Which really just meant a lot of cleaning up…
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